


How the Immortals got over their Incompetence: A Story in many Acts they could have easily avoided

by vanitaslaughing



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Ascians (Final Fantasy XIV), Dark Knight Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Enemies to Friends, Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers Spoilers, Nonbinary Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), pre-5.3 fanfic; everything from 5.3 onwards is NOT taken into consideration for characterisation, ryne has a monopoly on the braincell, wol is NOT the 14th
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:21:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 74
Words: 280,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23876107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitaslaughing/pseuds/vanitaslaughing
Summary: The People: Hydaelyn's Chosen, the Oracle of Light, the Crystal Exarch, the EmissaryThe Issue: two deities roused by the wildcard Zenos erasing everything they worked for and elemental imbalanceThe Solution: that's a good question, but perhaps if they address the elemental imbalance they can get their own wildcardThe Second Issue: addressing that means they have to save the two other Unsundered... and find the Fourteenth.The Second Solution: stop fighting, good luck, and enough competence to steer this ship to a better ending
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light, Ryne | Minfilia & Warrior of Light, Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch & Warrior of Light, Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Hythlodaeus
Comments: 242
Kudos: 119





	1. OPENING ACT: Down-the-timeline Alliance, Part 1

The last time he had heard his own steps echo like that in this tower was… the times where the doors closed for good on the Source. The first time it had been only him with the Garlond Ironworks and Sons of Saint Coinach behind the closed doors, a steady thrum that made his blood sing in his ears as he shut the Crystal Tower down. The second time it had been him once again inside the tower, with once more the Garlond Ironworks behind him, all of them saluting one another ‘ere the doors slid shut and he departed for a world unknown.

This time he was not alone.

One set of steps was accompanied by an irregular dripping noise, the steps uneven and the breathing heavy; it silenced the steady thrum that had become a part of him by now.

He turned around with a scowl and stared into the man’s half-closed blue eyes. “Would you mind vacating the body you are inhabiting, or hurry up with bleeding out? We are running out of time, and I truly do not believe a _vessel_ such as yours can take what is to come.”

As if to accentuate his words, a heavy blow outside made the very tower itself shake beneath his feet. The axe-bearing and heavily bleeding man dropped to his knees, unable to keep himself standing.

“Always… so rude, you mortals,” he whispered between heavy breaths as the other two people kneeled down beside him.

The girl in particular looked rather worried for his condition, and for the love of the Twelve, the Exarch did not understand why Ryne cared. If anything, they had to thank this Ascian in particular for at least half the mess they were in. The other half—not to speak ill of the dead—they owed to those fortunate enough to not live to this conclusion. The soothing light of a healing spell reflected off the crystal floors and walls, likely sparkled through his crystal hand as well.

The Warrior of Light kept their attention on the lower floors—very likely the doors. After what felt like an eternity and a half Ryne finished her first aid session and the man on his knees instead sat down. They did not have time, the Exarch wanted to hiss, but it was rather clear that the Emissary was not going to move until he said his part.

“I do have to ask once more if you permit.”

“You know our answer, Emissary,” the Warrior of Light said dismissively, a hand on their weapon and their eyes still on the staircase they had just ascended slowly. The Exarch noted the trail of blood with a scowl. “We had best hurry.”

“You would choose this path, full knowing that you are casting off the _humanity_ you so treasure without a second thought? Do not try to make me laugh, Chosen One of Hydaelyn; it is not very funny at all.”

Long, awkward silence. The Crystarium had been evacuated thanks to their allies in Eulmore a long time ago, the very city he had helped to build a war zone between those that should have never risen again to meet thus. Hells, they had barely made it into the Crystal Tower as things stood—Elidibus himself had used his body as a shield for them while the Exarch opened the doors just enough for them to slip through. It was a miracle he had not taken the katana that had nearly torn him in half with him as a parting gift.

It was Ryne who broke the silence, her voice surprisingly steady for the one who looked the most scared. “There is no other way. If we are to shed our humanity to see the people we love saved then we will do so without a second thought. Besides… we are all involved with sending the balance askew enough for… for any of this.”

With that the Emissary heaved himself to his feet, still unsteady despite his wounds being mended just enough. “Balance,” he muttered and closed his eyes.

“Aye,” the Warrior of Light said. “Balance. A balance that will truly bring the world equilibrium—not usher us into an endless sway of chaos, but not leave you and yours forgotten.”

Their plan was simple, desperate even.

Unpredictable events had taken place while they had fought their fight, their war of light against dark. Despite the departure of the Scions it had seemed as if Elidibus had finally gotten the upper hand on the First, more and more people gained the Echo and the Warrior of Light stood as tall as only they could but even one such light could be drowned out if there were too many. It had been a loss—the Ascian had won.

Technically.

But on his very hour of victory, a shrill sound had set the skies ablaze and shattered a boundary that had not been meant to be shattered. While they had fought their war, in the background another force had worked towards awakening Zodiark and reinvigorating Hydaelyn both—and had succeeded. Suddenly the Crystarium had become the battlefield of two deities fighting out a war they had allegedly ended aeons ago. Suddenly an old enemy was back. 

Suddenly their only option was to team up to stand up to this.

Where he had been a moment away from victory, suddenly Elidibus very hesitantly agreed that this was an outcome not good for anything or anyone. The balance was gone and needed to be restored, and their only means of fixing what had gone wrong was the Crystal Tower.

Oh, how he cursed his younger self at this moment. A memory distant and almost forgotten, but the Exarch did remember that he once said to Krile that he envied her gift. The gift he knew now was also a curse.

They would talk properly once they arrived in the past.

Without waiting for any of them to catch up, the Exarch stalked off and roused machinery he had maintained lovingly and restored when it broke. In a twisted sense, this was both what the Crystal Tower had been restructured for and yet was so very far away from the ideals that the Ironworks of a bad future had held up.

He muttered an apology to Biggs as the tower shook while two deities fought outside and one single-minded man sought entry to this building to complete his pointless, bloody hunting game.


	2. OPENING ACT: Down-the-timeline Alliance, Part 2

He would have expected some sort of fanfare. A great change, inner turmoil—perhaps that aching loneliness dragged out anew, raw despite the fact that it had been smoothed over right up until the moment the world seemingly turned against him.

The Crystal Tower reappeared in a flash of light after the Calamity, but by the time NOAH was approached by Doga and Unei, naught but clones of its creators and creatures running rampant remained. This time, there were no such inhabitants. In fact, to non-blessed eyes there would have been nothing at all. The passengers were no longer human by any means, even if he had the dubious honour of getting to keep his body, however little of it had not turned into crystal by now.

The other three had no such protection and therefore were all but stuffed into proper containers. Proper containers that had ferried the Scions back to the Source in the timeline they had just abandoned. Now they held the Warrior of Light, the Oracle of Light… and an Ascian.

Not blessed with the Echo, the Exarch was entirely at the mercy of Elidibus staying true to his word; a hissed promise spat out in utter agony as the stolen corpse bled out anew. Just the fact that he had been vain enough to breathe proper life back into this body left more questions than anything he said answered.

“Worry about yourself; I swear I will ensure they will be able to control what they need to control.”

It was the aftermath of the Calamity outside, and here he sat as an old man listening to an Ascian teaching new ascended Ascians how to control their powers—he dimly remembered staying awake for no less than three days straight after the Calamity together with Krile. Hells, there likely was a G’raha Tia awake and alive who had but recently gone through this very event of sitting with his best friend while she desperately tried to piece together what had happened in Eorzea.

He waited for what felt like an instant and an eternity all at once. Then, finally, his patience cracked and he glared into the lower control room.

“You have had your time. We agreed to talk this through once we arrived, and it is high time we did so.”

No one answered.

He attempted to make the Ascian and his companions speak to him several more times as the sun set and rose over Eorzea, set and rose, and finally set once again.

The Crystal Exarch remained mortal after a fashion. Despite technically not needing anything but raw aether that the Crystal Tower provided, he truly wished he could chew on one of Krile’s godawful cookies that she made whenever she was stressed to the high heavens and the seventh hell at the same time. At least that would have kept his mind off the vacant crystals that had housed the other three that still refused to answer his demands to be spoken to.

Then, just as suddenly as his anger dissipated, he heard a sound behind him followed by footsteps. He slightly turned his head and raised an eyebrow in surprise—then jumped to his feet and, as embarrassing as that was to himself, flattened his ears and fluffed up his tail in sheer indignation.

“No,” he hissed. “Absolutely not.”

The Warrior of Light had claimed their own body as their vessel. It was like staring into a strange mirror because even by the time the Exarch and the Warrior had met, the Warrior had already been the saviour of Eorzea and had just as many scars as they had tales to tell. Right after the Calamity they had but recently beheld the skies that awoke their latent powers—a backwater farmer’s child, young enough to not matter but old enough to take off on their own in a few years. They turned their head to their side and shrugged at where the Crystal Tower detected a source of dense aether laced with heavy amounts of light not unlike the soul of the Warrior. It would seem that Ryne had not taken a body for her own, and the Exarch understood.

The Ascian, on the other hand….

Elidibus shrugged vaguely. “’Twould be most unwise to let this one continue as he does, all things considered. You ought to thank me for eliminating the need to kill him the very moment he and his fellows open the doors to your domain.”

The Exarch was staring into his own face several years younger, with no crystal consuming large amounts of his body and one eye still the same green as his mother’s. The expression was painfully neutral for what was supposed to be a young man on the verge of setting out for a country that he had always dreamed of visiting. Hells, even though the memory was distant and felt unreal, he could still remember that very giddiness that had made him bounce from one foot to the other.

“Could you not have removed me—him—ah hells. Is there no other way? One decidedly less—“

The Warrior of Light nodded to their side, then cleared their throat. “No, unfortunately not. Emissary, if you would.”

For all his stoic neutrality, there was a hint of exhaustion in his younger self’s eyes that belied the fact that a being much more ancient had taken control of that body. “That which was sundered yet seeks to be whole if cut loose. And if not cut loose, then the stronger and the weaker start clashing until one consumes the other. Seeing as you are much more powerful than your younger self _and_ are irreversibly linked to the Crystal Tower, your younger self of this timeline would have died sooner rather than later to a sudden, inexplicable death—a death that would mean that you consumed your own soul. It is something that the Warrior and Oracle can work around given that they bear the Echo. You, however, cannot. Rather than have this boy die suddenly or worse, survive long enough for history’s flow to bring him unto the gates of your tower, I removed him from the equation. Much as your vaunted hero over there did with their own past self.” 

There were so many things that would go awry in ways not particularly relevant to history itself but rather with Krile’s growth immediately after the Calamity that the Exarch glared at the Ascian in his younger self’s body.

Elidibus blinked back, an almost bored neutral expression on his face and the tail of the body he borrowed perfectly still. The Exarch knew very well that his ears were still pinned back and his tail was swishing back and forth—but the way the Warrior of Light stared at them and then pinched the bridge of their nose was rather telling. Three pairs of eyes turned onto them, the Exarch assumed, given that he could not see Ryne.

“Alright. Alright, if we are to succeed and not turn another timeline into a wasteland where gods awaken and start attacking each other across every reflection while one particular madman tries to finish his hunt, we need to work together. I am not happy about his choice for body either, G’raha, but he has a point. Let us leave it at that and petty glares.” They fiddled with a crystal they had been holding for the entirety of this conversation, then stuffed it into their bag. It looked quite a lot like their Crystal of Light but with an ominous glow to it—he would have to ask about that later, though he had a vague idea what it was. “We will have to deal with the past Emissary sooner rather than later. Perhaps keep your aggression in check until then, please?”

He straightened his ears back up with a low grumble and then nodded. 

“Thank you, G’raha.” They reached for a smaller crystal that looked like it could easily be fashioned into some sort of necklace and offered it to the Exarch. “You might be able to see and hear Ryne that way until she figures out a way to make herself visible to you at will.”

The crystal was warm in his Spoken hand, and a moment later he did catch a glimpse of a vaguely defined thing floating next to the Warrior.

It raised what may have been an arm to wave to him. “My apologies,” Ryne said, her voice muffled as if she were speaking through a thick wall. “But for the time being this is all we can manage.”

Thusly reunited, the four of them exchanged wary if not exhausted looks. Here they were, a man more Crystal Tower than Spoken, two Ascians with the Blessing of Light, and one timeline’s remaining Unbroken. What a merry, merry band, he thought dryly—in the past, many heroes had started out as ragtag bunches but this was _ridiculous._

Eventually Elidibus moved slightly, the ears of his stolen body drooping as he rubbed his eyes.

“Very well. The cliffnotes version, as my predecessor would have demanded whenever people started rambling. Letting history continue as it does inevitably leads to a time where Zenos, once he chases me from his vacant body, not only finds but aggravates the dormant Zodiark pieces on every shard enough that He bursts forth. In immediate reply to that, Hydaelyn throws Her every Chosen as well as Herself against this, leading to annihilation not unlike Termination. It starts on Their first battlefield and spreads across the land until it is consumed and the pieces swept back to the Source, where without doubt Termination will begin anew. Dodging the hunter, we have come to a point in the past where we can yet prevent this horrendous end, prompting our ceasefire if not straight making us allies.”

The Exarch and the Warrior both nodded, and Ryne crossed her arms.

“The thing that led Zodiark to react to proper stimulation was horrendous imbalance between light and dark. Rampant light kindled the spark that past Rejoinings ignited. We will have to address that imbalance, but…?”

Elidibus hung his head. “As we are, you are the paragons of the Sundered, whereas I am the sole paragon of the Unsundered—a Warrior of Light, an Oracle of Light and an Exarch of Light alongside an Emissary of Darkness, if you will. Given how events go, in order to keep the balance we will… have to….” 

“Prevent Lahabrea’s demise at the hands of a Primal of his own making, and avoid getting into a fight to the death with Emet-Selch to even the odds with a Speaker of Darkness and an Architect of Darkness,” the Warrior of Light said and pinched the bridge of their nose again with a heavy sigh. “Emet-Selch we could reason with, easily—and if we cannot appeal to his uncomfortable interest in mortals then we can always appeal to his godsforsaken laziness. Lahabrea… may not be so receptive to any approaches whatsoever given his, ah, mental state as Emet-Selch described it, but not having his support is also out of the question.”

A nod from the Ascian, and he subconsciously fluffed up his stolen body’s tail either in annoyance or anxiety. “Merely keeping that sort of balance is far from enough, however. We would still have to deal with Zenos; ideally we prevent him from gaining his bastardised Echo entirely. There is also the question of the rest of the Conv— _Ascians.”_

A long, heavy silence hung in the room for the longest of times. The Warrior of Light had their arms crossed and a deep frown on their face as they turned their head from side to side with a low hum and closed eyes. Ryne beside them kept nervously tapping her fingers against her chin. Elidibus, too, had his eyes closed and a deep scowl on his face.

“Could we appeal to Zodiark and Hydaelyn after we collect our merry band?”

“No,” Ryne and Elidibus said immediately and the Ascian nodded at the girl to continue in his stead. “I don’t quite think we would be truly in balance once we got everyone. If we apply the elements as they are to the group, with us of the Light as Astral and those of the Dark as Umbral we are… we are missing darkness and light. Activity and stasis.”

Elidibus crossed his arms. “In other words, a neutral party to stand between the Scions of Hydaelyn and the Paragons of Zodiark.” 

The Exarch narrowed his eyes. Subconscious or not, a Miqo’te’s mind was easy to read at times—and the Ascian’s tail kept twitching in agitation while his slightly turned ears gave away the fact that he was very unhappy with whatever he was thinking about. Which in turn could only mean one thing. 

“You have someone in mind,” the Exarch said plainly, and the Ascian’s ears flattened against his head.

“And this would be where our problems truly begin. Someone who is both active yet unmoving at the same time. Someone whose convictions are immutable yet at the same time they are willing to fight a fight not entirely theirs. There is precisely one person across all Reflections that fits these criteria, and merely the fact that you would be working with us to keep Hydaelyn and Zodiark from running rampant is enough to deter him.”

The Exarch was confused, but the Warrior and Ryne stuck their heads together and started urgently whispering to one another. He caught a few words here and there—something about Y’shtola and the Anyder, Amaurot and Emet-Selch, names and places that he had never heard about. Meanwhile the Ascian’s expression grew darker and darker the more he caught.

It was Ryne who broke the silence that spread after the two were doe discussing something.

“We never quite found out what to do with the name, but is the person you are thinking of… Gerun?”

Elidibus remained stoically neutral for a moment. Then his expression dropped as he buried his borrowed face in his borrowed hands. “Your half-uncovered truths remain as infuriating as before—but yes. Gerun. The fourth Unsundered who owes allegiance to neither Zodiark nor Hydaelyn, who championed for giving the world to the Sundered yet swore to not interfere with whatever we who serve Him were planning. Gerun, the Seer. Our missing Fourteenth.”


	3. OPENING ACT: Down-the-timeline Alliance, Part 3

The Ascended had on occasion come across their own shards, yet there were no instances of an Ascended having to kill a mortal holding a piece of their soul. While the Unknown never terrified him, given recent developments he had to admit that he harboured certain doubts about this entire venture. History had so very rarely gone off the beaten path, and now it was all gone askew.

It didn’t help that he had no idea what would happen should they find and eliminate this timeline’s Emissary. And infuriatingly enough, the Exarch had proposed a theory on how this nonsense worked based on his experience, and Elidibus understood approximately nothing of it. Hells, the Warrior and Oracle of Light had both vacated the premise, citing something or other in the lower reaches demanding their attention.

Thus he was sitting on the floor with the Exarch, just enough space between them that no one could attempt to throttle the other.

Eventually he had to break the silence to sate his own curiosity. “Could you repeat that theory?”

The Exarch let out a groan—Elidibus cursed his choice of a body as the infuriating tail slapped against the crystal floor impatiently.

“Fine. Fine, since the wise Emissary doesn’t understand, let me simplify it. Do me a favour—nod or shake your head.”

He did neither of these things, and the Exarch exhaled loudly through his nose. 

“Very well. You chose to do neither. There is a timeline where you nod, a timeline where you shake it, perhaps even one where you attempt both simultaneously. The timeline branched there and you will be the Emissary who did neither. Normally you cannot travel to a timeline where you are the Emissary who shook his head—the Crystal Tower has the ability to travel to that. Now, normal time travel theorem that you certainly had in Amaurot as well suggests that changing an event in the past can lead to a ripple in time that expands, perhaps even erases you from existence. Well. If you combine the two of them with your own theory, it explains how I am still here and why you will survive killing your alternate self. You are still the Elidibus who did neither, and you are killing the Elidibus who shook his head to take his place. Unsundered as you are, there will just be a massive surplus of aether that will return to the Lifestream; whereas our sundered souls would consume the pieces.”

He crossed his arms and nodded. It was a ridiculous theory, but everything about this had been ridiculous to begin with. From the moment the Warrior of Light had managed to overpower Lahabrea everything had gone downhill—and while every Ascian was liable to blame Lahabrea for whatever went awry thanks to his reckless, self-destructive and bloodthirsty nature, Elidibus for once in his immortal life found himself unable to blame the Speaker for this.

“I answered your question, Emissary; good manners dictate that you answer one of mine in turn.”

The two of them exchanged a level glare.

He had failed in stopping the Exarch from sending the Scions of the Seventh Dawn home. But this in turn had opened the very chance of victory if he but played his pieces in the correct order—and he had. While on the First the Exarch, the Oracle and the Warrior of Light attempted to scavenge up as much information as possible, the Garlean Civil War’s fires ignited the spark for a Rejoining. The overabundance of Warriors of Light on the First were the correct measure to prime the shard for a Rejoining, too, and all he had had to do was incite the Ardor and enjoy the fruits of his labour that Lahabrea and Emet-Selch both had failed to harvest.

Moments before the unexpected return of Zenos he had had an axe but a hair’s breadth away from the Exarch’s neck. Connected to the Crystal Tower or not, he had glowered, a body without a head did precious little.

Petty as mortals were, the Exarch had vehemently disagreed to taking the Ascian with them, to the point that even the Warrior of Light had almost agreed.

“… Then ask your question, Exarch.”

“We searched high and low, asked the Ondo and the Fae for help, scrounged up every little book on history from before the Flood in the Cabinet, even left Y’shtola at the bottom of the sea for an age and a half to attempt to wring as much as she could out of Anamnesis Anyder—but enlighten me. Who are you? Or rather, what are you?”

“An Ascian.”

“Well, duh,” the Exarch hissed, surprisingly young-sounding for once as he rolled his eyes. “Elidibus, the Emissary—that is the title given to you. You hail from Amaurot, and though your body is long perished your soul endures thanks to it being untouched by the Sundering, thus making you what we call Ascian, Paragon, Bringer of Chaos. That much we know.”

Elidibus closed his eyes with a sigh. Long, long ago, before desperation had driven Lahabrea to unorthodox experiments and made him quit giving lectures, he had overheard plenty of rants by the man about students being infuriatingly vague with their questions. Was that how he had felt back then? “Be more precise. If you know that much you need not know more for it is not yours to know.”

A muffled slap of a tail on crystal under heavy cloth gave away the Exarch’s irritation. “I am not asking for your _name_ , Emissary. I am perfectly content calling you Emissary or the devil, thank you very much. But fine. Are you the same Amaurotine who sacrificed himself so serve as heart of Zodiark or not? Nothing we came across ever answered that question.”

A wry smile spread on his face as he tilted his head. “And what if I am? It would not matter, because as things stand Zodiark rests Sundered, the souls of my brethren that would include by own silenced by your dear Mother. A husk, you may say, but a soul rather than a body.” He waved a hand through the air, wry smile still on his features. It were thoughts that none of the Paragons had entertained in so many years that he had not forgotten about them but delightfully kept the topic shelved. An empty body void of soul was never considered alive in Amaurot, though the nature of flora and fauna oft sparked debate on that particular topic. An empty soul void of body or its own will—now that was something that had never been raised at the Hall of Rhetoric.

The Exarch kept his annoyed glare fixated on him, and were he still the same person as back in Amaurot, he may have shifted under that piercing stare. He did not, however, and instead lowered his hand to stare into it.

“Nay, I am not that selfsame Emissary who gave his life at the End of the World. Seats on the Convocation are not to be left vacant under normal circumstances. With Gerun, fickle as he had always been, there was a high chance for him to return once everything was said and done and his temper flared down. Elidibus, prior to his departure from the mortal coil, passed his title and its responsibilities to his student. That student, of course, being me. You will get that much and nothing more; anything else remains irrelevant to the grand scheme of things. Does that answer your question, Exarch?”

“That it does indeed.”

* * *

The issue, he very soon pinpointed, were not scruples about doing what was necessary. The girl was unnaturally fierce and stubborn, drunk on the fervent desire to make a change as every fool with that neutered Echo binding them to Hydaelyn was. She did not bat an eyelash at him slaughtering a band of bandits stalking a trader with medicine that was to be brought to the survivors of Camp Revenant’s Toll. She didn’t even so much as blink or ask what his issue was when he stomped on one corpse’s ribcage hard enough to shatter several bones (Emet-Selch did that a lot, much to his annoyance).

No, much as he considered mortals to be irrelevant and barely alive, she considered every life not spent on harming their fellow man precious, untouchable.

Ryne had completed her Ascension like everyone else had done, but unlike the others she quite refused to acknowledge the fact that she belonged to the group that could easily take over living matter. Yet at the same time she reeled against and refused to instead slip her soul into an empty shell.

Even after he patiently explained that he could easily form that matter to suit her own preferred looks. Empty vessels were much easier to form to one’s will—Emet-Selch rarely vacated bodies he took and thus changed many features to fit his own better, whereas Lahabrea cared not about the additional waste of energy on making something suit him properly when he already wasted his reserves on jumping from one vessel to the next. 

The last report he ever received from Emet-Selch had been about the girl and his realisation that the Word of the Mother lay dormant within the girl’s body—and that the girl had demanded to be taken where the Word had said she would wait until there was an answer. It was clear that the girl had consumed the Word’s soul much as the Warrior of Light had consumed the soul of the Warrior of Light from the First. Her powers were impressive, but now that they stood in the middle of a lichyard he realised that she was just as mortal as everyone else. 

“Look,” he began anew, an annoyed strain to his voice that even he could not hold back any longer. “You heavily neuter your own powers should you insist to continue this nonsense. It is easy to turn a lifeless corpse back into a living, breathing body that will feel the same as your discarded one did.”

She frowned, her eyes on the small, glimmering crystal that she had chosen as catalyst for her soul. As things stood right now, it may as well have been her body, the soul he saw but a manifestation of her fervent desire to be seen. Not that anyone but those with a neutered Echo could see her in this state. 

“Is that why you bled while holding control over Ardbert’s body?”

He was approximately another question away from burying his face in his hands. Mortals truly did nothing but infuriate him. “To play the part of a resurrected hero, one must needs cover the resurrection ploy. Mortals that do not bleed are seen as monsters. That is, however, beside the point, Oracle. If you would save those you lost this time around, you perhaps ought to do what you revile.” 

She frowned at him. 

A week on the Source and she had watched the people in the aftermath of the Calamity most keenly, albeit from a distance. After all there quite a few mortals who gained the Echo in the time surrounding the Calamity itself, and Ryne stayed out of sight mostly because the Warrior of Light claimed they did not remember where their fellows with the Echo were at this particular point in time. 

The bad thing about empaths like her and Emet-Selch before he lost his mind to hatred was that they absorbed the utter misery of the people around them. And since she was quite young for mortal standards despite all the hardships she fought against her new nature. 

Battered and bruised and bleeding quite profusely, young Unukalhai had nailed him down with a glare not unlike Ryne’s back in his dying world. 

Children. So unnecessarily stubborn. 

But Unukalhai had taken his offered hand after quite an impressively long time of Elidibus merely sitting next to the dying child because of his whispered request. He did not want to die alone, and enemies or not, Elidibus indulged that request. 

His expression softened a little. “I know it is against your nature as one of Hydaelyn’s Chosen. But consider that you are not breaking Her unspoken rules out of malice. You are doing it to not only save you and Her but everyone else on this shard and the others. You remember what happened to Eulmore in the wake of Zodiark and Hydaelyn’s awakening, do you not? You can prevent that. But in order to do so, you will need to assume a physical form.” 

That, and the sun was slowly starting to rise. He had bloody unearthed a fresh grave for her; not particularly something that he enjoyed but he had even spent a day perched out of sight watching the lichkeepers do their duty. The body was that of a young woman who had ingested something that had been poisoned in the aftermath of the Calamity; otherwise the body was unharmed. Nothing as gruesome as attempting to flick a severed throat back together. Or assisting a lesser of his brethren in sewing a half-rotted corpse’s limbs back where they belonged. 

But much like Unukalhai eventually had reached for his hand, Ryne’s glare wavered more and more as the sun rose higher and higher. 

A sigh meant that she had understood what was necessary, and he handed her little crystal back to her. 

Not a soul saw an eerily calm Miqo’te and an awkwardly stumbling Hyur leave the lichyard. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "did you recently replay any part of zero escape" maaaaybe
> 
> anyway last set-up/prologue chapter, adjusted tags a little, next up, act 1: how i killed my doppelganger


	4. ACT I: How to kill your Doppelganger, Part 1

“Beg your pardon?”

A moon passed in relative silence—Elidibus had claimed that if they were to stand a chance they needed to be taught the basics of magical travel, lest they be swept away by the Lifestream like Y’shtola had been in the past. On top of that, she soon realised, there was quite a lot more aetherial maintenance to keeping a body under control. The Ascian had merely cracked an uncharacteristically wry smile and said that it would not be so hard were they not so horrendously broken. 

“I-I… wondered if the name… Meteor. It wasn’t… given to you at birth like me and how everyone called me Minfilia, right?”

Thancred and the other Scions she met on the First before the Exarch succeeded had all called them the Warrior of Light—only when she had insisted on being told their name had Thancred and Urianger exchanged a look and then said “Meteor”. She never quite felt comfortable calling them by that name when they did arrive after all; the name had only escaped her when she brushed hair out of their pale face in the aftermath of Mt Gulg. Something quiet that no one, least of all the Warrior of Light, heard.

Currently the two of them were in the middle of a travelling road somewhere in Thanalan that Ryne had already forgotten the name of. Something or other that they needed for the Exarch to haphazardly fashion into a soul vessel to hold the other Elidibus in place long enough for them to destroy him and let theirs take his place awaited them at the end of this road, and despite the fact that they could have easily taken the same way that Ascians moved about, the Warrior of Light had almost insisted on reappearing somewhere in the middle of nowhere and walk the rest of the way.

She had asked without thinking.

And now the Warrior of Light raised a hand. She flinched backwards a little—but all they did was gently ruffling her hair. Despite the new body to resemble her old one, she had to admit she quite liked the height; yet the Warrior of Light still towered above her.

“No, it wasn’t. Thought a different name was better for an adventurer. Realised too late if I died in a ditch no one’d recognise me. Realised too late that getting celebrated as Warrior of Light, Meteor, also meant my family wouldn’t realise I ain’t dead. But it stuck. Far as I’m concerned, they thought I did die in a ditch unfulfilled. Meant that no enemies of mine went after a bunch of farmers.”

The road was barely a road, and they met exactly one person on their way to some settlement. A merchant on a ruffled Chocobo, who raised his hand in greeting and Meteor returned the greeting. Those two started chatting about the Calamity and the Elder Primal Bahamut, the devastation that befell some regions. Ryne listened intently, hoping to glean where the Warrior of Light was from. She was curious, morbidly curious.

Thancred had said that they had been recruited by a pair of Scions known as Papalymo and Yda, though Yda was later revealed to be her younger sister Lyse after Papalymo’s heroic sacrifice. Those two had been assigned to the Black Shroud, a region that apparently was a small part of what she knew as Rak’tika—Lyse hailed from Gyr Abania, which also was included in the Rak’tika region on the First. She had assumed that the Warrior of Light had been from the Black Shroud because of that, but as she went to find the Heartstone with them they complained about forests being so strange and that they were glad they had not been born and raised in one. 

They moved through Thanalan like they belonged into an arid clime like that, but yet they seemed to lack some of the familiarity that the people of Twine showed. Hells, she had grown as bold as to ask if they had been born in Eorzea at all, to which they only replied that they had been and never elaborated further.

She had a sneaking suspicion that they were from La Noscea. They couldn’t be from Coerthas, which had become Il Mheg and had once been Voeburt. While they did admit that they had quite liked Ishgard they also said that they were rather glad that Il Mheg was nothing like that. They also definitely weren’t from anything that Garlemald had conquered—Emet-Selch had asked them where they were from when they arrived in Rak’tika and all they had said with a mildly concerning overly cheerful grin on their face was that it had not been imperial territory. 

“Where ya from, kids?”

The merchant asking that as his Chocobo clicked its beak snapped Ryne back to reality. She kicked one of her feet into the ground a little, hot embarrassment flooding through her for spacing out like that.

“No kids like y’all ought to be travellin’ on foot to grab somethin’ from a backwater settlement. Specially not after that there Calamity.”

She averted her gaze, and much to her surprise she heard the Warrior of Light sigh. “Calamity’s why we’re on the road, pops.”

He looked at them both with a furrowed brow. For all intents and purposes, what he saw were a pair of Hyuran youths, one barely an adult and one in her late teens. As Meteor had put it countless times, the perfect age to be randomly orphaned and leaving home after a world-changing event. Apparently this merchant had come across his fair share of such youths—he very clearly was analysing whether to offer them to tag along with him to the nearest refugee camp or not. But between the worn but reliant axe that Meteor had grabbed and the pair of simple but sturdy daggers that Ryne had found in the depths of the Crystal Tower, they both actually looked like they could make it.

“’Preciate the concern, but this pair of Nosceans is tougher than you’d think,” Meteor eventually said, their usual confident grin on their lips.

The merchant only barked out a laugh at that. “Well, reckon y’all know what yer about. May the Twelve keep ya safe, kiddos.”

“Twelve watch over you, too, pops.”

She waited until the merchant was completely gone from her vision to pat Meteor on the arm gently.

“Say, uh… why La Noscea? Both of us could get away with being from Thanalan or Gyr Abania.”

Meteor looked at her for a long moment, then turned their head back to the road ahead. The settlement they were going for wasn’t all that far away now and Ryne only now realised that the had spent the better part of an afternoon on the road and she was not feeling tired at all.

“Well, I’d be lying. No one knows where you were born but you grew up in Eulmore, Kholusia—so, La Noscea on the Source. And me? Farmer’s kid from La Noscea.”

She blinked at them a few times, then snorted. Suddenly all the very specific complaints they had had made sense. All the times the Scions had rolled their eyes at them doing something that was considered backwater but was rather charming to her in particular. A hero, but not a hero from a city with a glamorous backstory. No, a farmer’s child that had picked up bow and arrow one day and then took off to the see the realm they had been born into. “That… that explains a lot.”

“And what, pray tell, is that supposed to mean, O Oracle of Light?”

* * *

Stress test, Elidibus had called it.

“Screw this,” Meteor called it while dodging a heavy blow aimed at them.

She had very gleefully forgotten about just how terrifying Creation magic was after their triumphant return from the Tempest. While the Ondo had called forth creations of Ancient making, other than Emet-Selch’s recreation they had not quite dealt with actual Creation magic. She had _watched_ how effortlessly Elidibus had reached for one strand of ambient aether after the other and woven it together with the boundless, at its base dark reservoir of his own aether. Countless times since she had gained the full power as the Oracle had she watched people’s souls, especially that of the mages in their group, and come to recognise every school of magic the Scions had mastered. 

The closest thing to Creation that she could think of was Alisaie’s red magic. She, too, relied on her personal aether to weave her spells, but she did not take in the slightest bit of outside aether. The only thing that she used on top of her own aether was a catalyst to channel that aether through; excess use left her aetherstarved and nauseous. Elidibus did not seem bothered in the slightest despite the veritable army of creatures attempting to drain them of their aether or to club their bodies into pieces. No, he merely floated out of reach with a grin on his face as he watched the two of them struggle. 

Ryne wondered what was going through the Ascian’s head watching them like this. 

Emet-Selch had always watched, more attentively than he usually admitted. His interest had been centred around Meteor mostly, but in Kholusia he had also watched her do her part in seeing the giant Talos built through not even his usual half-lidded eyes. No, Emet-Selch had watched her with a piercing amber glare that was ever so slightly unfocused, as if he was staring at something invisible to sundered eyes. 

It was hard to tell what was going through Elidibus’ head, even if the ears and tail gave a lot of his general disposition away. But just as the Exarch had been mysterious while he wore the cowl, Elidibus retained his aura of danger by donning his normal robes and mask, even if the cowl was down. 

She rolled out of the way of another swipe and watched as the Ascian crossed his arms. 

Stress test. 

Emet-Selch had judged them for the mortals they were and found them wanting, as per his own words. Through stubborn perseverance in the face of utter annihilation had they managed to defeat him and changed his mind, something that Elidibus harshly criticised. Perhaps he wasn’t conducting a stress test after all. He was gauging their worth and… finding them lacking, judging from how his body’s tail curled up and his ears were drawn back. 

Staring at him for a while had given her an idea, however. Technically speaking she and Meteor were both Ascians as well. The two of them had barely managed to master travel via teleportation, mostly haphazardly strung together through Elidibus’ dark-aligned teachings and the Exarch’s exhausted but boundlessly patient adjustments to better suit their light-aligned nature. He wasn’t testing their combat capabilities—he knew very well what they could and could not do; he had beaten them fair and square through careful observation and clever manipulation. Which could only mean that he was testing them to see if they were adaptable enough to find a solution to an issue that seemingly had none. 

According to Thancred and Meteor both, Ascians quite preferred floating about to walking unless they were trying to pose as mortals. Something about plain laziness or a flair for the uselessly dramatic. Indeed, Elidibus was floating up there, and Ryne watched the surrounding aether churn. He was controlling his creations like puppets on thin, aetherial strings. Thin enough that if someone were to break his concentration they might snap. But getting up there was impossible; he would see her reaching for and throwing a dagger from miles away. 

Meteor continued doing what they did best; they tried to gather these monsters so that they could keep the group away from her. 

She hadn’t ever tried to _float,_ of course. Every sort of teleportation outside of the tower had been her clinging to Meteor because they knew the lay of the land and she did not. Since neither of them could float willingly quite yet, they had made a point in keeping solid ground under them. 

She very quietly shot a prayer to Meteor’s Twelve as she ripped open a portal as quickly as she could. It took less than a few heartbeats and with a surprised, almost terrified yelp she jumped through the exit and effectively onto Elidibus’ back. 

He grunted and she clung to him desperately hoping that he wouldn’t shake her off—but her distraction tactic had worked. His concentration was broken, his creations stopped dead where they stood, and Meteor understood what she was getting at. Very quickly they pulled a bow and arrow seemingly out of thin air and just a moment later she heard the sound of an arrow hitting something solid. 

For a long, long moment everything stood still. Then his creations vanished while Elidibus slowly lowered him and her down to the ground. She let go of him, her knees weaker than she liked to admit, and hurried back to Meteor’s side. 

Elidibus plucked the arrow from his mask with a blank expression. 

“Were this normal material and you a normal mortal, you’d be dead,” Meteor stated flatly, and Ryne nodded beside them as they put a hand on her head. “I would say we won, Emissary.”

“Mhm. Fascinating. Unexpected, but very fascinating. You indeed did—but answer me this, Oracle; how precisely did you figure this out?”

She shrunk away a little, fully aware that both Emissary and Warrior were staring at her. 

“I… I saw you were still controlling them. So I wondered if we were to break your concentration we might create an opening, but… anything other than jumping at you like that you would have seen coming from yalms away…?”

He nodded, his blank expression suddenly turning into a wry smile on his face. His aether also started glowing in amusement. 

“An excellent observation.”

“But… why? Why call this a ‘stress test’ and then demand this as an answer?”

His smile only grew wider, almost a little deranged given that she could not see his eyes through the mask all that well. “The element of surprise is something that we will quite need to… ahem, replace this timeline’s Elidibus without rousing the suspicion of Lahabrea, Emet-Selch or any of Ascended. I cannot surprise myself outside of existing, but you two… well, for the time being, you will be the joker I have in my hand ‘gainst my own self.” 


	5. ACT I: How to kill your Doppelganger, Part 2

Even through the layer of Tempering, the part of him that yearned for darkness and naught else, he managed to curse this entire situation out for a moment before his body’s legs gave in under him and he dug his fingers into his hair and almost started pulling in frustration. He had been the victor, and then suddenly he had been on the losing side. The entire playing field had been toppled and though thanks to stubborn mortals that loss had been unravelled like the playing field itself, the fact that he had failed in the end haunted him.

It had taken so long for them to get this far. So very, very long, with losses just as bitter as the mortals had faced—before Lahabrea taught them better in his final failure, he had thought that perhaps that loss of self was the worst loss the Unsundered would face. But he had failed each and every soul that had willingly given themselves to Zodiark to protect their people. Emet-Selch had paid the price for his atrocities and failures by getting torn into pieces. Lahabrea had paid the same price by quite literally losing his mind and then getting so completely unravelled that not a trace remained of him in the ambient aether after Shinryu’s defeat. Whatever of his madness bled into the shade of Nidhogg and the Primal that Zenos had used to his ends, it had been completely undone by the time the Primal fell.

Whatever happened in that timeline they had abandoned was no longer any of his business, but there was no way a single soul would understand that anger and guilt that now simmered within him.

The Exarch seemed to be watching him. Elidibus hated that look of pitiful understanding—as if that man’s abandoned bad future compared to that monumental loss of Zodiark to madness.

A small voice whispered that perhaps the Exarch would understand if only he said what he thought. Even through the tempering.

* * *

He swore he could hear Gerun’s flat, sarcastic voice telling him that he never quite escaped his tendencies to babysit whatever younger being he came across. Like some sort of displaced mother hen, he’d said at some point long before Gerun turned his back on the Convocation and he himself became Elidibus in the chaos. In a sense that had been correct back then and would remain correct for all eternity, but Elidibus cursed himself for the act of mercy in the name of balance right now.

He was being followed through Mor Dhona—not by scavengers, not by thieves, not by anything that he by all rights should have feared. But it was a bothersome pest, one that he admitted he cared about.

He had not dispatched the boy to interfere with mortals until much later, of course, but much like any other Ascended, the kid was free to roam the Source as an unseen entity. Unseen by most mortals, one of which Elidibus was decidedly not. And given that the Calamity had just occurred with a shower of meteors and fire that awoke deep-seated echoes of horror in some souls, of course he had sent the boy out to see if there was not a way to tally however many awakened with the mortal Echo.

Of all possible Ascended to find and stalk him, it had to be the one he had qualms about killing.

Halfway between the fledgling settlement that would become the headquarters of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn in five turns of the seasons and the Crystal Tower, Emissary Elidibus in the body of a Sharlayan scholar dug his heels into the blighted ground and curled his hands into fists.

“I can see you, boy,” he said, the voice coming out of his mouth a strangely juvenile version of the Exarch’s.

He was just that. By all means he was a Miqo’te from Sharlayan’s Students of Baldesion named G’raha Tia right now; old enough to travel on his own but barely old enough to be wise. No, he would have to play the part of an idiotic young man whose life lay ahead of him.

The same energy that Unukalhai had already lost by the time the rest of the Convocation arrived to take measure of what Igeyorhm had done incorrectly and how they could have prevented it and if there was still something to be salvaged. That energy had long since left Unukalhai, his fruitless fight against the dark that had swallowed his home and every person he had known coming to a bloody end. Elidibus remembered sitting beside the bleeding boy who whispered that he had wanted to save them and they had instead turned on him. Turned into monsters—and that he knew he would not be joining them, no matter how much he wanted to. Too much light in too weak hands, a world on the brink, and a pool of blood that slowly spread on dead soil.

Though he cared little in the end, it was something that he would never forget. He had offered the boy a hand in mercy and for the sake of balance. Perhaps if even just a shredded, ascended yet incomplete soul survived the rest of the shard could be salvaged and reunited with the Source. Eventually. One day. As long as at least one survived—and the boy took the offered hand.

Elidibus sensed the jolt of fear go through Unukalhai as he slowly left his hiding space, even if it was impossible to parse with the mask. The Ascended like Unukalhai had no tangible form, yet there was just enough that they could change about them with enough focus that even now the boy was trying to copy him in particular. He almost wanted to chastise himself for not pointing out that Amaurotine masks did not cover the lower half of a person’s face.

“Pray tell, what about me is so interesting that it warrants following me through the waste for so long?”

“You… you see me,” Unukalhai whispered and then muttered something about the Echo to himself.

He would have preferred not having to play the part of a mortal with the Echo again so soon after he had already played the part of a bloody Warrior of Light for so long, but he made a point in acting as any young mortal fool would. In this case, he swished G’raha Tia’s unfortunately rather long tail through the air in agitation and narrowed his eyes. His ears were drawn back a little as well. “You are evading my question, boy.”

Unukalhai flinched at those words. “Oh, oh. Oh, yes. Beg your pardon, sir. I was merely interested in where someone would go all by their lonesome when the only ways out of Mor Dhona are blocked by the imperials and the sudden blizzards tormenting Coerthas. There is… nothing in that direction.”

“Nothing but the mysteriously resurfaced Crystal Tower of Allagan design, which has been the topic of myriad papers and historians since the very Calamity that saw it vanishing.” He made a point in straightening up just enough that Unukalhai could see the tattoos marking him as an Archon of something or other from Sharlayan. “Hurry on back to the camp, boy. I will be perfectly fine—but there will not be anything of interest happening other than a scholar staring at the very centre object of his study.”

If Unukalhai were to look any closer he might have recognised the armband that this Miqo’te wore as the selfsame one that the Emissary put on his vessels… merely more worn, scratched, as if he had been in a few scuffles that the boy had never seen him get into. But the boy seemed to be more concerned about getting out of this without the Echo-bearer he was talking to realising that he was in fact not a living being. He bowed, apologised, and then all but ran as fast as his incorporeal legs could carry him.

Elidibus watched him until he was out of sight and opened himself a portal with a deep sigh.

* * *

He had had half a mind to tell them that they had nearly gotten compromised, but none of his supposed allies even moved from where they were when he entered the room with the same sigh still on his lips. The Oracle of Light was lying on her back with a heavy tome lifted above her head so she could read whatever its contents were, her long red hair spread around her head like a halo. The Warrior of Light and the Crystal Exarch sat next to her, shoulder to shoulder, both of them staring into a tome that appeared to be the selfsame one that the Oracle had in her hands. The Exarch’s tail was curled around one of the Warrior’s legs, a concentrated frown on his face that broke into a small smile when the Warrior patted him on the shoulder and pointed out a passage in the book.

For a long, long moment it was so easy to imagine all the gaudy mortal robes replaced with the plain black communal ones of Amaurot—it was common enough for study partners in more secluded parts o libraries to take off their masks to scowl and laugh at one another as they conducted their research. But he blinked and the illusion he wanted to weave broke before it even took form before his eyes, and he very quietly sat down.

Ryne lowered her book and hauled herself up, quietly placing her book down and shoving it slightly over to him so that he could read it. He thwapped his tail against the floor and nodded at her.

And almost broke into laughter when he saw the tomes. One looked more worn than the other, likely a time-traveller from the Source much like the Exarch himself. The other merely smelled vaguely dusty and as if it had not been touched in quite a while.

“ _The Gerun Oracles,_ my Allies of Light?”

“Urianger mentioned them after the Word of the Mother departed with the Warriors of Light from the First,” the Warrior said and brushed a strand of the Exarch’s hair out of his face. “We just thought—“

“It is too early to dive into any of this,” Elidibus said dryly and earned himself a particularly nasty glare from the Exarch. “Contend with Gerun and what morsels of information he attempted to dispense to mortals without interfering with the hand of history once we have completed our, ah, replacement heist. Other things demand your attention—instead you steal from the Sharlayan library in the Dravanian Hinterlands?”

The Exarch tensed up and immediately relaxed when the Warrior of Light put a hand on his shoulder. Ryne, meanwhile, started frowning deeply.

“You have a point, yes, but knowing your enemy is knowing half the battle, as Thancred used to say.”

He bit back a comment about knowing what he could find about Lahabrea had very much not protected him from the Ascian. Instead he sighed. “Gerun is hardly an enemy. He is not your—our ally either. That is the point of his refusal to side with Zodiark and Hydaelyn.”

The Exarch shook his head with a scowl. “If I may, Emissary—we are not researching merely Gerun. Once we finish our _replacement heist_ there remains another issue we have to work with. Namely, the flow of history. It must needs be preserved to certain points and we assumed that Gerun’s teachings could give us a hint on how to proceed.”

“And rather than asking the one who has spent the better part of eternity influencing the flow of history, you fall back to dusty books stolen from their shelves.”

The Warrior of Light scratched the back of their head. Ryne shrunk down a little. Even the Exarch’s normally defiant anger seemed to deflate a little as all three of them looked at him like they had been caught stealing from the proverbial cookie jar.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “However you managed to come out victorious so many times remains behind me. I am starting to believe that it has been dumb luck first and foremost, which would be a satisfactory answer to this question. Influencing history is—“

“An art,” a new voice said very plainly, and the blood ran cold in his borrowed body’s veins. “An art that has to be learned through long observation with a historian’s eyes, best done after meticulously stitching the ideal outcome that one has to manipulate towards together.”

The Warrior of Light had jumped to their feet and grabbed their discarded weapon off the ground in the same motion—the Exarch had hauled himself back to his feet with his staff, and Ryne stood there with only one knife drawn. Elidibus himself got up slowly trying to bite back the laugh that bubbled up in his throat.

“Well, that makes things both harder and easier simultaneously.”

“Oh? You did not let the boy go because it was a calculated move?”

“Come now, you of all people ought to know that there is no way to calculate anything mortals do. Ascended or not, he remains a mortal at heart.”

“Assuming I heard you correctly, you ought to have known where the boy would go. Letting him go was a grave error on your part.”

“Not the first I made, and certainly not the last. But do enlighten me, has your own curiosity truly driven you out of hiding so soon after a Calamity where those with the Echo are not only plenty but rampant?”

“And you consider this relevant for what reason?”

The silence that spread for a moment was heavy, important. He pat down his white robes that were covered in the crystalline dust of Mor Dhona immediately after the Calamity—next to the other’s pristine white they looked like someone had dragged him through the mud. In a sense he had been dragged through the mud.

Elidibus started smiling. “Because that may very well turn the grave error into a stroke of genius solving several issues all at once. I am not the only one prone to strange mistakes, Emissary.”


	6. ACT I: How to kill your Doppelganger, Part 3

For a lack of better word, she was doing what Thancred and Gaia both had called her usual fretting whenever things that were out of her control were bothering her. His upcoming return to the Source had made her nervous, something that Gaia had poked fun at several times and then stopped to deliver her usual almost a little cold-hearted advice. It had anchored Ryne even after the Scions had departed, knowing that Gaia was there and would deliver some sort of cold comment about how she was making her nervous as well. The Crystarium had welcomed them both with open arms once they had seen to most of the Empty and only time could tell what would happen there, with Gaia even going as far as demanding lessons by the guard if only to control her own powers better.

With Elidibus gone, the heavy atmosphere in the room vanished—the Exarch was much less tense and Meteor also started smiling their small but noticeable smile again.

The two of them were recounting past tales about how the Ascians that Meteor had faced in the past had been slain, and Ryne was left listening in on that and wondering.

For a lack of better term, Meteor and her were Ascians as well, something that Exarch pointed out dryly at some point when they talked about one Ascian named Nabriales and the woman who had created the first White Auracite, Moenbryda.

The common denominator for all Ascian defeats was aether. Nabriales, Emet-Selch and Igeyorhm had all been slain by weapons forged from immense amounts of aether drawn in from the surroundings or from being offered by nearby people after being encased in White Auracite. As Meteor said with a frown on their face, the Ascians Loghrif and Mitron had been slain similarly, albeit without something to encase them by the Warriors of Light on the First. A handful lesser Ascended under Lahabrea had met their end thanks to Meteor dabbling in Allagan summoning arts for a while, though their end came about by their souls dispersing after not finding a suitable host immediately after having their current host reduced to cinders. Lahabrea and the Ascian Emmerololth had had the very aether of their souls consumed by what Meteor only called ‘the Eye’ and the Primal Eureka respectively—according to research the Exarch had found in the future, it was speculated that half the reason why Nidhogg’s shade and the Primal Shinryu were mad beyond what they ought to be was that some of Lahabrea’s madness lingered in the aether that had made up his immensely dense soul. 

People had plucked the stories of the Warrior of Light apart time and time again; from Cid Garlond and Nero Scaeva spearheading the initiative immediately after the Eighth Umbral Calamity to historians and researchers specialised in the Scion’s history, no stone remained unturned. Hells, now that she had seen some reports it seemed that two of Meteor’s siblings had survived the Calamity and one had gotten unceremoniously slaughtered for that connection once it came to light.

Since neither her nor Meteor had any clue what time travel and reconstructing history entailed, they had given the speaking floor to the Exarch, whose voice was surprisingly soft as he began recounting his tale.

By the time he had finished they all agreed that history needed to be as undisturbed as possible, even if it meant that some people would still have to die.

Ryne was fretting because something about this whole situation was bothering her. Not the possibility of people dying—no matter how many stories the Scions told her about them, she had no face, no voice to attach to Moenbryda and Papalymo, Haurchefant and Yotsuyu and countless more. The only one she had a voice and face to attach to was Minfilia, and the three of them agreed that while her fate was tragic it may as well be unavoidable.

“Unless, of course, we meddle on a grander scale than before,” the Exarch said and turned a page in the Vrandti history book he had pulled out from a stack of books. “According to Emet-Selch and what Ardbert told our friend here, along with what they learned from hunting down the Cardinal Virtues… it would seem that the First’s plight began the very day the Warriors of Light struck down Loghrif and turned their gaze onto Mitron. Light already held sway over the star, and killing one guardian of darkness and leaving the other defenceless, well. That, of course, would mean we would have to fight a war on two fronts, although it seems a rather good way of keeping Emet-Selch out of harm’s way. If neither Loghrif nor Mitron die, nor does the First fall to light, there is no need for him to be roused and interfere with Norvrandt.”

Meteor tilted their head at that with a frown. “If the First does not fall, you alas interfere with the direct conclusion of the Dragonsong War. With the Warriors of Darkness missing from the field, there is no reason for the Scions to leave their base of operations for too long—assuming everything else remains the same up to that point, we would find Thancred either much sooner, or would take much longer since neither he nor we will be drawn to deal with Ravana.”

After that they had both fallen silent, with a deep frown on Meteor’s face and a scowl on the Exarch’s. Ryne was fretting, still half expecting Gaia to appear behind her and start going off on her usual good-natured rants about how sitting around doing nothing was not going to solve the problem and that if all else failed, she could always join her for training with the Crystarium guard.

An unusually heavy sigh escaped Ryne. She missed Gaia. She missed Eden, Lyna, and the First at large. She missed Thancred and Urianger.

“… Oh,” she whispered, which caught the attention of the Exarch and Meteor. She looked up and at them. “We are… clueless about interfering with history, are we not? But… on the topic of the Dragonsong War… was Urianger not involved with Elidibus and the Warriors of Darkness at that very time? What was the book that Elidibus gave Urianger as an answer, and… don’t you think we could use that book to seek our own answers?”

The Exarch furrowed his brows a little, his tail swishing from side to side as he thought and walked through the room. The Umbilicus was already a mess, but this room was a literal library of untouched but loved books. Most of them were from the Source with a handful Vrandti books in the mix. The Exarch stopped and turned in a small circle, his red eyes darting about as he turned.

“The _Gerun Oracles,”_ Meteor said and stood up.

“As Elidibus claims, written by the very fourteenth member of the Convocation in an attempt to forward knowledge to the Sundered without directly interfering with the flow of history. It might… give us answers as to how we ca guide history along. In fact, I do believe I have a copy of the tome here in this very collection, but finding it will take some time.”

Meteor rolled their eyes and gestured at Ryne to come over to them before clapping a hand on one of the Exarch’s shoulders.

“I know the layout of the Great Gubal Library quite well. The tome is likely kept in the basement, seeing as the top floors are not quite the right section. Ryne and I can break and enter just fine—you seek yours, we will go retrieve the tome from the library.”

* * *

Breaking and entering, as it turned out, was the very anticlimactic “teleport straight into the basement” tactic.

On the other hand, nothing could have prepared her for the sheer volume of books stored away in this place. The Cabinet of Curiosity and the Exarch’s private collection plus whatever was in the belowground of Eulmore was the extent of what she expected a library to be—a spacious but not too spacious place filled with books. The floor of the library alone that they were on likely held more books than every collection on the First did.

She jolted out of her awe when Meteor beside her let out a low chuckle.

“I—my apologies.”

“Oh no, no,” Meteor said with a laugh still in their voice. “I promise you I, too, stared at the shelves like that when I first arrived here. To think this was all left behind by Sharlayans as they returned to their motherland with only Master Matoya as its guardian boggles the mind. All this knowledge, so close and yet so far.”

Ryne threw a cursory glance over the shelves right in front of her. It seemed that they were full to the brim with books on the void and something that was called the War of the Magi. Suddenly she was rather happy that Urianger and Thancred had spared no effort in teaching her Eorzean script—she was rather unsure if the Echo would have translated things for her. Perhaps this library could answer any questions about the Source she would have ever had, even those that none of the Scions answered. Perhaps somewhere slumbered something from Amaurot despite Emet-Selch’s insistence that not a trace of it remained on the Source after all those Calamities. 

She tilted her head a little. “This reminds me of our excursion into Anamnesis Anyder together with the Scions.”

Meteor crossed their arms. “True, true. And once again we seek answers with no guarantee that we will find them. Well, you can fend for yourself just fine if some sort of defensive mechanism activates; I suggest we split up. This basement is rather spacious.”

With that, they jogged across the room without disturbing anything nearby. Most of the creatures floating about seemed to think of them as similar somehow, seeing as Ryne was perfectly able to stand right next to one and checking out the shelf. This section appeared to be about tinctures and poisons used throughout history, some written in a slightly more antiquated script than the others. She did recognise some letters from the Crystal Tower, which could only mean these were of Allagan origin.

After a bell or so, once the awe had passed, she was rather frustrated that there was no librarian or register anywhere nearby. Moren had made a point in ensuring that there were several people who knew which section in the Cabinet held which sorts of tomes, and if none of them were available there were registers scattered about and attached to the shelves. Urianger had had everything sorted neatly into sections like this place, but his collection was much smaller than this entire complex.

Her eyes had glazed over at this point, the titles all wavering in front of her and making less and less sense. Somehow she was glad that she had never been in the presence of just that many books—she loved reading, but this was an unreasonable amount of them in too little space.

She almost passed over a tome that looked a little older than the others. She stopped mid-turn and looked back at the book.

Thancred and Urianger had taught her quite a lot more than just basic Eorzean. They had also gone into more antique scripts, how letters had changed and what not. All things that Norvrandt had lost with the Flood; so many little bits of history just gone in a deluge of light. But the Source persevered and though Calamities swallowed up large amounts of the world as it was, the only thing that truly left facts in obscurity was the passage of time. Elidibus had so callously called them out on how easily words and truths were twisted, how easily things were forgotten, but… some things survived. Some people knew the truth about the Warriors of Light even before the Scions and the Exarch had set out together to uncover it.

Some things were older than recorded history itself, Urianger had mused at one point, told through stories passed from parent to child through the endless turns of mortal generations. Even if the truth had become an anecdote and then a fable, a legend, a cautious tale perhaps based on reality, it survived.

This book definitely looked as if it had seen its fair share of years. The letters were a lot more antique than she would have thought. And yet, there was one word she just managed to make out.

Gerun.

“Meteor,” she called cautiously. “I think I found it.”

* * *

“Say, G’raha.”

The Exarch had found his copy of the book as well, though he sheepishly admitted that it very likely was the same tome just from different timelines. Now all three of them were sitting on the floor in the Crystal Tower, with the Warrior of Light and the Exarch next to each other in front of the Exarch’s copy and Ryne left with the copy she had pulled from the shelf in the Great Gubal Library.

She saw the Exarch flick one of his ears into Meteor’s direction.

“Did you ever truly read that book in particular, or was it only passed into your safekeeping by the Ironworks?”

For a moment the Exarch seemed to hold his breath, and Ryne narrowed her eyes a little. Despite everything that had happened his kept his history close to his heart, where no one could tear it from him. After all, he had been sent on what had come out to be a suicide mission.

“… I must confess, I did not read much of it. As much of a historian I claim to be, I assumed this particular tome to be full of nonsense that has been proven either correct or incorrect, and at large it was unrelated to my mission.”

Those two started a fairly animated discussion about history books that had been written after the Calamity and how it might help them figure out what was utterly necessary for the timeline. Ryne meanwhile gingerly turned a page and stared into the book.

All this focus on history made her think. History seldom remembered the people behind the roles they played. A king remained a king, even if he had a hobby that was rather mundane behind the politics.

Elidibus and the Exarch both seemed to be more concerned about keeping the flow of history intact, Meteor appeared to be floating down that river with them, and Ryne found herself clinging to a rock and wondering what all those historical figures thought when they made history. Meteor was a great example of not thinking about it, but the way the Exarch talked about his history books right now it sounded more like people attributed a desire to protect the greater good to them. Ryne of course knew that they never quite thought about the greater picture; they had the Scions and their other allies to think on a greater scale for them.

It seemed as if the Ascians always thought on a greater scale and forgot the individuals. Just like the history books.

It made sense, of course. They had not quite had to worry about short lifespans and that seemingly lingered even now that they were, comparatively, immortal. That inability to think about individuals had created that rift between the Convocation and Venat’s faction from what they had unearthed on the First, though many details were lost simply because it had all happened before the Sundering and out of six individuals that knew, two were deities who would refuse to speak, two were dead, one had been on the verge of killing them before his assured victory vanished before his eyes, and one… one was hells-bent on staying out of history.

That sort of extreme neutrality sounded more like the actions of a villain to her than the actions of someone they could come to an agreement with. Whether this Gerun truly was a villain or not remained to be seen, but to her that inaction may as well have been Gerun personally making certain everything and everyone died.

But, she reckoned after turning another few pages and picking up the book, she wouldn’t be able to truly have an opinion on him until she met him. Elidibus had been rather insistent that Gerun was not to be approached until they got Emet-Selch and Lahabrea to live through the events that claimed their lives in the old timeline.

She rolled onto her back and hoisted the book above her.

Ryne found herself wanting to meet these people she had heard about just as she had wanted to meet Y’shtola and the Warrior of Light before—even if Gerun and Lahabrea did not sound like pleasant company at all.


	7. ACT I: How to kill your Doppelganger, Part 4

All plots and plans they could have hatched would have been for moot sooner rather than later, Elidibus realised as he grinned at his own past self.

The Ascended would have been present everywhere, which would have made a direct attack on the Emissary nigh impossible. It would have been the group right after the Calamity, not perhaps complete but much more numerous before the Source’s Warrior of Light cropped up. Rather than the intimately familiar stillness of the moon, it would have been halls that occasionally had someone other than him prowl the surface. The dark cloud of hatred and restless energy that followed Lahabrea’s more and more fraying soul as he stalked across the surface, coat billowing behind him and mask hiding his likely feverish pale eyes. The glacial silence and stillness of Emet-Selch that accentuated his exhaustion and the loss of his always fleeting, foolish hope that this cycle might bring something of interest. The Ascended and their much diminished states, but still a presence that towered above mortals.

Were any of his newfound allies still truly mortal, perhaps he could have metaphorically sneaked them in to stab his past self before he caught wind of their presence. But Ascended as the Warrior of Light and the Oracle of Light were, it would have been impossible even then due to their Blessing. It beat like an irrational, sick heart, threaded through the fine aether that made up their soul—just as the latent trauma of Termination beat alongside it; the Blessing of Light cautiously rousing that age-old trauma without awakening the associated memories. Any Ascended would have been able to sense that sick heartbeat and would have flocked to it within moments, not to mention the remnants of the Convocation’s own Tempering reacting to that very element. Half-forgotten though it may have been, they would have struck with swift precision, a vengeance in the name of what was their deity now as well as hundreds, thousands, millions of souls that had been their families, friends and neighbours, acquaintances and colleagues once. 

Not even the Crystal Exarch would have been a good choice. His profound link to ancient Allag’s greatest creation meant his aether carried but the faintest trace of Emet-Selch, the selfsame spark that raised empires and saw them fall over and over; deliberately and delicately crafted weaknesses or the lacking strength of mortals properly exploited. The Crystal Tower’s halls sang of that exploitation—and the Crystal Exarch’s aether carried the selfsame spark that Emet-Selch had left in these halls. Though not immediately, within a few heartbeats the Ascended Convocation and the Unsundered would have been upon that signature, seeing as it was not supposed to have returned quite yet. Yes, he did not doubt that they would have mistaken the Exarch for Emet-Selch for but the most fleeting of moments and sought him out. 

But he had failed to account for his own foolishness. That childish curiosity that lingered even through the Tempering and the loathed-yet-beloved duty to return the star to its former state. The same childish curiosity that made him offer hands to broken Warriors of Light whose Blessing made him flinch away from them. Be it a hand to a child bleeding out on the ground with a crystal clutched to his torn chest or a hand to a group of five under a sky so violently bright that it tore at his own soul while their own souls flared with bright agony. 

Of course Unukalhai would go running straight to the Ascian he reported to. That was what the Ascended did, especially in the aftermath of a Calamity. They scouted for possible snags in the route in this Umbral Era as the Source called it—in the Umbral Eras quite a few servants of darkness fell to those that worked to restore the realm. Seeing a being without a body meant that the seeing one had the Echo, but his existence was troubling to a soul he personally ascended. 

Yes, Elidibus was barely capable of keeping himself from descending into mad, amused laughter right then and there as he stared into the Emissary’s face. 

Unukalhai had only reported one person with the Echo—not three of them and a man capable of controlling what Emet-Selch deemed uncontrollable. Rather than struggle to break in and murder the Emissary, the Emissary had come to them completely on his own. 

The Emissary lacked the urge to go as prepared as possible because he had not had to deal with the Warrior of Light the Source would send eventually. He had not lost Lahabrea and Emet-Selch alongside countless of the Ascended, all slain and torn and ripped to shreds like bothersome pieces of paper by this one mortal and had not had plan a Calamity entirely on his own as on the Source more and more Ascended fell prey to an unknown element. 

He would have very likely become this selfsame Emissary who checked thrice, made certain to account for nigh every possibility—and still wound up blindsided by a possibility he had not considered from that angle after a wildcard he deliberately left in play went and did the unthinkable. 

But now, as Altima had said about Emmerololth as well when she fell to her own greedy curiosity—it was that selfsame curiosity that killed the cat. Or would kill it. 

Though they had not set up a trap for the Emissary proper, the Exarch carried one of his soul vessels around at any time. Without an infusion of blood and an abundance of aether, it was but White Auracite with a fancier name and a look borrowed from both Amaurot and Allag. Once they wore him out enough it would be easy to trap him and then immediately after the Exarch could give the amount of aether necessary to the Warrior of Light. 

He would have free reign over this timeline. He could very easily betray his supposed allies and sweep this timeline clean of any mistakes and prevent the many heavy losses they suffered. 

But he could plan that at a later time. For now he needed his supposed allies. 

It seemed that the situation was catching up to the Emissary as he once more glanced around the room cautiously. He had no idea that they knew how to slay an Unsundered, of course, but he was outnumbered four to one. “A strange situation, to say the least, though I fail to see how you can change this to your advantage.” 

Elidibus let out what must have been a cackle of delight at that, seeing as everyone present in this room jolted somehow. Ah, how unbecoming of him—it seemed as if that victory ripped straight from his arms and his alliance with his former enemies had broken down the calm facade he built around himself. “Truly, a strange situation,” he echoed with a wide, likely rather deranged smile on his lips. “But as I said, one that solves quite a few issues.” 

Without much more than that, he lunged forward. There was something refreshing about being back in an Eorzean Source vessel; while Zenos had been powerful beyond reckoning he had lacked a capability for finer aether manipulation no matter how much the body was augmented and mangled to enable brute force. Even Ardbert, powerful beyond belief on the First, was a shadow compared to this whelp of a Sharlayan scholar. True to the Exarch’s own words, G’raha Tia was not very skilled with magic of any sort—but being from the Source, even the slightest bit of talent towered over that of a Garlean and from a shard of the First. It was exhilarating to see the Emissary sidestep a blast of darkness and have that selfsame darkness yank up and coil around itself at the slightest twitch of a finger. 

That one attack seemed to have broken the stillness in this room that they had all settled into after drawing their weapons—the Warrior of Light nodded at Ryne who both also lunged forward to stand beside him while the Exarch remained behind them with his staff held upright. 

It seemed almost comical to him that the sword he had shattered not too long ago was now protectively held in front of him. The dagger that had tried to pierce his borrowed flesh’s heart to force him out was now drawn to help him, and the staff that had so very desperately attempted to drain the aether out of him was now aglow with the elements that made up what mortals called white magic. 

The Emissary seemed not impressed by that in the slightest and merely narrowed his eyes behind his mask. 

Elidibus shrugged. “Come now. You waltz into this place unprepared and alone like a fool and then expect us to give you answers, Emissary? Has the Ardor gotten you drunk on success enough to forgo all preparation? Were this a debate hall, you would have been disarmed and booed off the talking floor by now.” 

“… Your mortals do not seem confused by this statement.”

“ _My_ mortals? Oh no, no. Make no mistake.” He waved a had through the air and then put the other against the sword in front of him with a level smile. “Though forced into an alliance, we very much are enemies and will always remain enemies at heart.”

He had spent a long time watching the way the Scions operated—especially the Warrior of Light. As it turned out they fell back to the tested and tried tactics of one person all but provoking enemies and the rest taking care of them while another dedicated their time to patching the others up. Normally it was easiest to deal with mortal gaggles once the healers were taken out; a weakness that they had nothing to answer to unlike their whole selves back when the star was whole being capable of easily rejuvenating even the more dedicated healers in a strike party. 

Normally the Warrior of Light was the one to provoke the Primals they faced with a party of Echo-bearers. After all, the Blessing of Light was what Primals in their feral state sensed and made them go after that dangerous element that could still the very aether around them. Quite a few other encounters it had been the Warrior of Light on their own, whatever weapon they had clutched close to their heart and striking true. That was how Nabriales and Igeyorhm had fallen, to a veritable one person army. 

Oh, the Emissary had no idea what he was facing. 

Elidibus had dropped many more honourable tactics long ago, but adapting to overcome a ridiculously overpowered mortal had made him turn quite rogue compared to how he fought before that. Whatever he still held close to his heart about honour in combat had withered away as more and more of his brethren fell. 

He wrenched the spell he had been holding still around, up, around. Ill-defined as it was it was merely meant to get the Emissary’s attention as he shoved the Warrior of Light’s blade away and stepped forwards. Elidibus may have been a fool in the end, but he knew just how much of a fool he could be. Spells like that were only taught to people who were desperate back in Amaurot. Surely that was enough to distract him for a moment. 

Indeed, he saw the Emissary flinch barely out of the spell’s trajectory and then watched the Ascian shake his head in confusion. “Ridiculous.” 

“ 

And with that, they attacked. 

* * *

In the end, it boiled down to a literal piling onto the opponent until they stopped moving. 

Their defeat at his hands had taught the Warrior of Light and the Oracle of Light just about enough about how he acted in a fight to prevent him from fleeing. The Oracle repeated her little trick in the end, stepping into a portal and reappearing right behind him while the Emissary was focused on the Warrior of Light and the Crystal Exarch’s combined assault. That threw him off just enough for Elidibus to pull the same spell from his repertoire that had downed the Exarch in the Crystarium in the end.

A shower of little aetheric knives rained down upon the Emissary, who was distracted by trying to shield his face just long enough for the Warrior of Light to slam him into a wall. The Exarch followed it up with no hesitation whatsoever and hurled the Auracite at the Emissary. 

For a moment it was all still—then Ryne let out an alarmed cry as the crystal started rattling on the ground furiously. 

He deliberately turned around and looked away as Hydaelyn’s Chosen and the Crystal Exarch worked together to end another Unsundered in a fairly similar way to the first they slaughtered. The aetheric density from what the Exarch channelled was choking and overwhelming, and he could picture Emet-Selch raging against a similar concentration of aether even after being beaten in fair combat. Emet-Selch had never been one to idly lie down in a fight, which perhaps made him more self-destructive than Lahabrea in the end. 

He heard a dull shattering noise, but before the aether could disperse properly the Crystal Tower all but absorbed it without even being given the command. 

“… I imagined he would put up more of a fight,” the Oracle of Light muttered as she stared at the shattered Auracite.

“Make no mistake, Oracle, though I would not have beaten myself in a fight, this one lacked quite a lot of… battle experience and combat theory. An observer can turn the tides of battle after enough observation even if he is not a skilled fighter.”

Long, heavy silence spread in the room. 

The Warrior of Light was to break it with a loud, almost hysterical laugh. “You’re joking. You’re bloody joking—you claim yourself an unskilled fighter, yet easily bodied all three of us!? And no, don’t you _dare_ claim this is because of our Sundered state. Working together made me capable of tearing a bloody hole into Emet-Selch; your Unsundered existence does not automatically make you stronger.” 

He turned to face the former mortals with a huff and was greeted with three very different expressions. There was a hysterical glint in the Warrior of Light’s bright blue eyes and their expression was one of utter disbelief. The Crystal Exarch had gone back to his normal glare as he stood beside them, his Allagan royal eyes gleaming blindingly red in the Crystal Tower’s light. The Oracle of Light meanwhile avoided looking at him, shrinking backwards and away as if to avoid the situation as a whole. 

Elidibus sighed. Loudly. 

He could still dispose of them later when they had their backs turned. 

“If we compare raw power levels, then I am lesser than Emet-Selch. Hells, lesser than a Lahabrea in full possession of his powers. But even the least powerful of creators can overcome that inherent weakness by substituting it with other supplies—or sheer control over their powers. Rapid adaption to easy problem solution, nothing more. Nothing less.” The Warrior of Light was glowering at him from where they stood, and Elidibus shrugged vaguely. “You cannot honestly believe that I spoke idly when I said that I would be watching you from afar and that I was looking forward to our next meeting. As for how and why your companions failed to have an effect on the outcome; ‘tis quite simple really. The Oracle was taught by you and your Scion accomplices, all battle techniques I had already studied extensively by that point. The Exarch on the other hand lacks power in combat just as I do but he has two other weaknesses on top of that. First, he lacks the adaptability. Second, much as Emet-Selch was directly involved with each and every thing that Allag brought forth, I was indirectly involved with making certain it had weaknesses to be exploited. A profound link to the Crystal Tower can be choked if one crushes the aetherial connection. A moment is enough to deliver a devastating blow.”

He put a hand on his borrowed cheek when all three of them now looked at him with differing amounts of anger simmering in their expressions. 

“Glare all you want, it is a simple truth. I fight from the drawing board, something that my predecessor taught me in detail. For the same reason Emet-Selch does not lift a finger unless forced into it and then fights with a ferocity unknown to mortals. For the same reason Lahabrea works and works until his very soul breaks under the strain and even then he but finds another surge of strength before guttering out—unless, of course, you catch him by surprise.”

A drawing board that broke easily whenever the fighters differed from the paths he drew up for them, but as he belated realised now every single divergence had been kickstarted not by a mortal but by one of his supposed allies. Nabriales had confirmed that Ascians were killable. Igeyorhm and Lahabrea had signed their own death warrants when they mocked the Warrior of Light and taught the Archbishop how to summon a Primal. Even Zenos in all his unpredictable horror had been a creation that could be linked back to Emet-Selch and his fervent desire to find something, anything of worth in mortals. 

“Which is why you need an element of surprise to take out an Emissary—something you lacked on the First. Something you cannot hope to construct properly without endangering yourselves or by understanding the very essence of what Amaurot was like. Knowledge you had once and that was taken from you.”

The Warrior of Light opened their mouth to angrily rebuke what he had said, but Elidibus silenced them with a wave of his hand before they could say anything. 

“Now if you would excuse me. If this replacement act is to work properly, I will have to take my own past self’s place. Expect Unukalhai as an intermediary some time soon. Until then, I bid you farewell.”


	8. INTERLUDE I: Of Combat Habits

“Enough! It is enough.”

He had not expected Gerun to be the one to call this test of strength off, but as it continued on and on, he had noticed that Gerun had started wringing his hands nervously. He knew how Elidibus operated better than most; but when it came to the Architect then Gerun understood the best. 

Elidibus, his master, stopped the almost brutal beatdown the moment Gerun’s voice rang through the room, and he turned his head just in time to see Gerun tap a foot against the ground and then run off to the battlefield. 

It wasn’t unusual for members of the Convocation to challenge one another to combat—the only one who openly refused it by claiming he was untrained in most any combat arts was Gerun, who was often then called in as a judge. However he felt about this fight in particular was hard to read. Gerun was hard to read in general, even as he dropped to his knees next to Emet-Selch and gently helped the sorcerer sit up. 

Whatever conversation ensued down there he missed—what he did not miss was how it went off the rails as it usually did when Elidibus and Gerun were forced to talk to one another. It was the weak on his feet Emet-Selch swaying and nearly collapsing back to the ground that made Gerun stop mid-rant. 

“I will see him to the infirmary. This _will_ be raised at the next meeting, Emissary,” Gerun hissed and then gently ushered Emet-Selch out of the room.

For a long moment it was quiet. 

Then Elidibus sighed. 

“He of all people ought to understand this is how matches on this scale go.”

“With all due respect, Emissary,” he piped up and also set foot on the former battlefield to throw a sweeping look around the room. There were deep gashes bleeding dark in the room. There were entire clouds of aether that wildly flickered and lashed out at the Emissary still. “The Architect is liable to go off the rails when driven into a corner. You ought to know that.”

That was how Emet-Selch had beaten Altima and Halmarut in a tag-team match the other century. They had driven him into a corner and suddenly he had turned the entire battle on its head. Gerun had laughed loudly when that battle resolved and said that they should have expected the powers of the dead answering the sorcerer’s call when he was in danger. What danger, he had asked and Gerun had merely cackled into his hands claiming that a loss might as well be death to someone as proud as Emet-Selch. 

“Of course I know that. I challenged him with the intention of understanding this sudden increase in strength—something that Gerun was explicitly told to expect. And yet….”

He shrugged at his master vaguely. “Gerun will be Gerun. He listens to no one, you least of all. I may have taken care of him when his parents were both busy, but he remains a mystery unsolved even to me.” 

* * *

There was exactly one fight involving Gerun that was recorded. He himself had already been announced as replacement Emissary for his own master who was going to be the final piece of the Zodiark concept. 

Gerun had handed in his resignation letter with a seething speech about this being against everything the Convocation stood for and that he was going to keep his conscience clear of this mess. 

It was Deudalaphon, almost fragile-looking next to the tall and dangly Gerun. He half expected Gerun to take after Elidibus’ brand of tactics before strength. After all, both were in similar positions in the Convocation. Deudalaphon’s weakness was her stamina; while strong and fast she was easy to tire out. 

Emet-Selch had looked rather angry and tired lately, but his expression had derailed completely when he had heard that Gerun had accepted Deudalaphon’s challenge. 

“He is… he is all raw strength and no control. If you ranked us by that raw strength alone, he would tower above all of Amaurot by a large margin. No, I am not worried about Deudalaphon—I am worried about _Gerun.”_

The fight itself was over within moments. Just as Emet-Selch had claimed, Gerun was all strength and no control. For someone who was on the lower strength spectrum fighting it off with a lot of planning and control like him, it was utterly baffling to see Gerun burn brighter than any aetheric lamp or even the Underworld itself for a moment. The training hall was _devastated_ in that singular blow; Deudalaphon was staggering backwards barely able to keep herself on her feet. 

Then Gerun swayed. 

Staggered. 

Collapsed without another sound or movement as if he were a puppet and someone had cut his strings. 

Emet-Selch and Elidibus both let out a low curse, with Emet-Selch jumping to his feet and running onto the field to check Gerun’s pulse. All while he did that he was glaring daggers at… Elidibus? 

* * *

He never asked Emet-Selch about that, even when he took the seat that was left vacant by his predecessor and master’s sacrifice. 

The only time he ever wanted to ask was after he unearthed a body in Kholusia. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in case youre wondering
> 
> 1) yes it was deliberately set up to be anticlimactic
> 
> 2) yes this is deliberately set up to sound confusing
> 
> 3) yes you will get answers. eventually.
> 
> 4) next up: a realm reborn... rerolled


	9. ACT II: A Realm Remade, Part 1

Despite initial claims that Elidibus was going to send his little Warrior from the Void as messenger more often than not, a turn of the seasons came and went and their little party of four became four and a half.

The Exarch had listened to the child delivering a perfectly fine report and watched his aether crease in slight confusion as to why there were two Ascended and a mortal filled in on Ascian machinations. But somehow, it took Unukalhai quite a while before he started questioning what Elidibus was doing—which in case told them that as long as their unusual all did not act too far out of line, no one would truly catch on to him not being the same Ascian as before.

The Warrior of Light caved eventually, claimed that despite them at first being at odds and a lot of mystery making Unukalhai an untrustworthy person, they had grown to understand one another and even become allies, friends perhaps. They were in the same boat, Meteor had said idly tossing one of Ryne’s knives up and down, and together they would prevail even if it meant Unukalhai would one day have to choose between them and the Ascians.

The very next time Unukalhai was sent to them with news about movement from both Lahabrea and Emet-Selch, he all but blurted out that he did not know what was going on but something was intensely going wrong. It wound up with them actually summoning Elidibus to verify their story, which ended with Unukalhai sitting on the floor with them, his head in his hands and shaking it in disbelief.

“You could not have… gone a little further down the line to prevent most of anything, then?”

It had been his time to shine—all eyes had been turned onto him as he explained how precisely the Ironworks’ design for the Crystal Tower worked. The temporal engine was based on the Primal Alexander’s control over time, but even that Primal’s control had its limits. He simplified it a lot, but in the end everyone understood the basics. The Tower could not go to timelines where it did not already exist; anything before Allag was an impossibility then. The space travel was limited to seeking immense sources of light across the rift and would very much wind up suspended in the Rift with no way out.

Elidibus, too, joined in on sitting there with his head in his hands, muttering something or other about mortals and foolishness as per usual.

Following that, Unukalhai’s strange professional tone dropped a little and he acted more like an accomplice than anything else. Perhaps that was for the best, the Exarch noted—Ryne was thrilled to have someone vaguely in her age range again after having lost Gaia, and Meteor seemed rather pleased that there was one person in Eorzea who understood them even if they did no longer know them as they had known them.

But one season later, and they were sitting in an unused room that the Exarch had admittedly forgotten about. There was quite a collection of discontinued Ironworks gear in here, from a wrench that he remembered had broken during the tuning of some machine to a bent gun that had saved his and Biggs’ life back in that devastated future. Ryne, Meteor and Unukalhai were sitting on boxes, while the Exarch paced around in the middle of the room and Elidibus was leaning against the wall somewhere.

“As suggested, I spent a fair amount of time going over books discussing the Umbral Era and its eventual end. The Warrior of Light and I talked at length about it, and it would perhaps be best if we left as much unchanged as possible—and that includes, fortunately or unfortunately, Lahabrea’s involvement.”

Elidibus sighed vaguely where he stood. “Leaving Lahabrea involved means that down the line an encounter with Nabriales is unavoidable for you. If memory does not fail me, it ended in a pyrrhic victory at best for you and yours”

Unukalhai hummed where he sat and leaned over to Ryne to whisper something into her ear. She nodded back at him and whispered something in return—all went unheard and unnoticed, because Elidibus, the Exarch and the Warrior of Light were engaged in a glaring match by now.

“If at all possible, I would prefer not having Moenbryda sacrifice herself to wipe Nabriales out,” the Exarch said flatly. “If we cannot avoid an encounter, at least we could divert it to a different point.”

“You misunderstand me. Much like Emet-Selch, I do not consider a single mortal life worth saving. Waste your energy if you must, but know that you likely act in futile throes,” Elidibus said and waved a hand through the air. Those clawed gloves still looked strange on his own younger self, the Exarch thought for a split moment. “The Ascended are ferocious and desperate to prove themselves. With an Unsundered humiliated like that, Nabriales will stop at nothing to prove himself better.”

“Well, if we cannot stop him, perhaps we can take measures to prevent it from happening again. You said that he invaded the Rising Stones because you had lost the Blessing of Light to Midgardsormr. Perhaps if we—“

“Unwise,” Elidibus immediately chimed in. “Retreading the path means that inevitably, we will have to reconstruct what took place immediately after, ah, what did you call it. The Bloody Feast? In any case, for that to take place proper you do need to form an alliance with the northern fools through begging their aid and helping with the mortal Iceheart’s attempt at summoning a goddess as well as investigating the Keeper of the Lake and then fighting on that bridge. All paths lead to the Father of Dragonkind and you cannot avoid having your beloved Blessing smothered into cinders should you encounter him. And having that Blessing smothered in any way means that Nabriales, seeking to outdo the shamed and injured Lahabrea, will come snivelling about your precious Rising Stones to retrieve the staff of Louisoix.”

The Exarch pinched the bridge of his nose. “I would appreciate if you stopped interrupting me, Paragon.”

“So interrupt me back, dear Exarch.”

“Look, you have a point but if you do not _cease_ this infernally _childish_ behaviour at once—“

“You seem to forget that we are on the same side.”

“Twelve know I _wish I bloody could.”_

“In any case, you are dealing with an inevitability—“

“Would you listen? We could divert Nabriales—“

“Does the woman mean so much to you? Some sacrifices cannot be changed—“

“I will not have Moenbryda die because you cannot control your nasty—“

“ _An Emissary watches more than they get involved, mortal sc—“_

“Well, pardon the jargon, Paragon, _screw that and screw y—“_

Several arrows buried themselves in the walls near both of them. They both flinched and turned to look—the Warrior of Light was standing there with a bow drawn, an empty quiver, and a cold, cold glare on their face. Elidibus straightened up and the Exarch shrunk into himself in shame. Whatever they were discussing, it directly involved Meteor. They were actively talking about history they had lived as if it were nothing more than a chart of possibilities.

“Could we perhaps discuss the more immediate history that will come to pass? As Elidibus pointed out, Nabriales approached in the midst of a rather complicated mess involving a city state that currently refuses contact with the outside world because of their own little war. And believe me when I say your constant fighting is not painting the future in a good light. Am I happy that we were forced into this alliance? No. Am I willing to work to make sure we do not end up in the same situation again? Hells, I am. So stop being childish. Just. Once. Both of you.”

* * *

“It is easier to react than proactively trying to avoid things,” Unukalhai said eventually, and that broke up all the infighting. Elidibus simmered down, his sudden flare of temper gone in a heartbeat. Ryne tilted her head and nodded at Meteor, while the Exarch deflated in defeat on top of the box he was sitting on.

With that it was decided that they would attempt to keep history intact as much as they could.

And then Meteor started grinning. “One small change.”

He had seen that grin before. It was a half-forgotten memory from better times, when the Crystal Tower shone in the distance and held secrets rather than was a tool to make ends meet. The expedition, when Meteor had been younger, less troubled, more adventurous than the quiet and solemn warrior that had come to the First to save it from the brink. Those nights they sat in his tent with countless books strewn about and a mischievous smile on their face before they threw a book at him or pulled on his tail lightly to get his attention.

“As you all know, I started as a single adventurer in Gridania and fought my way through quite a lot of nonsense almost entirely on my own before the Scions picked me up thanks to an Echo flashback I had in the middle of Ul’dah. Well. Unless I misremember, Lyse and Papalymo were in Gridania while Thancred was in Ul’dah and Y’shtola in Limsa Lominsa.”

“I very much like not where this is going,” Elidibus snarled from his spot on the ground.

“Like it or not, it is a good bet. Rather than a single adventurer calling themself Meteor winding up in Ul’dah at that point in time… how about it is a team of adventurers consisting of Meteor from Gridania, a young rogue called Ryne from Limsa, and,” there was that smile again and the Exarch’s blood froze in his veins while his heart beat so loud he feared everyone in the room could hear it, “a pair of twin Miqo’te coming from Ul’dah.”

“No.” “Forget it.”

Ryne giggled. “They do act like Alphinaud and Alisaie—so I dare saying they have the twin part down.”

Meteor continued to have a small smile on their lips as they tilted their head. “Of course, we would have to employ magicks similar to what Papalymo used on Lyse to ensure that no one recognises both of you as G’raha Tia. Glamours to change just enough details that not even Krile will recognise both of you. Emet-Selch said that this should not be an issue for you, Emissary. As for the Exarch… well, we can cover the crystal arm with gloves and long sleeves, and keep the neck covered and uh… bandages for the face?”

Ryne clapped her hands together. “But would people not insist on taking bandages off, Meteor?”

“Plenty of folks got some nasty scars from the Calamity. No one’s gonna bother G’raha if he says it’s to cover something like that.”

Elidibus was glowering at them from where he sat. The Exarch noted how agitated and insulted the Paragon truly was by how… utterly still he sat there. In a sense, he almost wanted to agree to this nonsensical plan just to spite the Ascian, but there were too many variables.

First and most glaringly… the question of a name.

“And what, pray tell, would you call the two of us in public?”

Meteor shrugged. “E’lidibus and E’xarch?”

A low groan came from the floor. The Exarch himself merely shook his head—hopefully that got his disappointment across. “No. ‘Raha’ is a fairly common name for Seekers, so I would get away with calling myself that. Perhaps if the Emissary gave us a name—“

If looks could kill, the Exarch was fairly certain he would have died seven and thirteen times over in that very moment. All he saw from Elidibus was a very calm and collected smile, his red mask framed by red hair.

“That, my unlikely allies, you will have to wrench from my lips as my dying words. Emet-Selch may have given you his, you will not receive mine from me.”

Unukalhai crossed his arms and Ryne put her forehead against a book she had snatched up earlier with a low groan. “How about we pass them off as mixed-blood Miqo’te called Raha’to and Painintherear’a?”

* * *

In the end, Meteor threw up their arms and claimed that sending Ryne out on her own would work, but the Exarch and Elidibus were liable to kill one another before they ever left Ul’dah.

Thus, the Exarch dryly suggested that perhaps they should go in pairs—him with Meteor, Elidibus with Ryne.

Ryne then next suggested that perhaps they could give themselves names like Meteor had done; after all they were going to pose as adventurers. That prompted a sigh from Elidibus.

“Then we ought as well not change names at all. Call your Warrior ‘Meteor’ all you want, yes—but does going by a title not imply that you could call yourselves ‘Exarch’ and ‘Oracle’ still?”

Ryne drummed her fingers against the box. The Exarch started to wonder what the Ironworks had even left in these boxes. He did not remember. He couldn’t open them while Ryne sat on them, however, and his curiosity would have to wait until this meeting was adjourned.

“Emissary might be suspicious down the line when you—“

“A trifling coincidence—after all, the adventurer who calls himself ‘Emissary’ would gain a title like Warrior of Light for defeating not only Gaius van Baelsar but also the Ascian Lahabrea. Clearly Ascians would not go after their own kind, meaning Emissary Elidibus and Adventurer Emissary are a coincidence and naught more according to mortal logic, no?”

* * *

A soft tap on his shoulder made him jump.

Just earlier they had decided on who took which sort of role; Meteor said that they could easily keep the role of the one taking most of the blows when they pretended to be a group of adventurers. Ryne said that she would remain with her daggers, and after a lot of verbally disagreeing with one another the had settled on trying to pass off Elidibus and the Exarch as pair of twins who were somewhat versed in red magic. After all, who was going to background check a pair of siblings claiming to be refugees from Gyr Abania who also just so happened to be versed in the one school of magic that found its origin there?

And while he was not a fan of lugging a slim sword that doubled as a staff around, it was true that this would work the best.

He turned around to see who had approached him.

Meteor merely gestured at him to ask him to follow them, and the Exarch did just that.

Just before everything had gone belly up, they had said that perhaps once the threat of Elidibus was removed the two of them could travel Norvrandt together. All those promises had gone up in smoke just as Elidibus’ victory had had, but somehow the Exarch found himself worried as he followed the Warrior of Light.

They pulled him through a portal right outside into Mor Dhona. Crystallised ground crunched beneath his sandals as they pulled him further along, down to Silvertear Lake. Once at the shore, they let go of his arm and sat down with a long sigh.

One of the last nights he had spent with NOAH immediately after their foray into the World of Darkness had been just in this place. While the others had fussed over Nero who kept insisting he was fine, the Exarch had dragged the Warrior of Light here to watch the sun set over Mor Dhona. The Keeper of the Lake in the distance had been both a ghastly and breathtaking sight all at once. A sight he had wanted to share, to show that the world continued marching even if all felt like it was going wrong. Then, rather than letting them dwell on what had happened recently then and letting himself dwell on the choice he was resolved to make, he had instead started joking that once this chapter was closed he ought to look for another thing to worry about.

Sharlayan did not need him back immediately, he had said with an ironic laugh and then said that perhaps he ought to look into how to become an adventurer, or unofficially join the Scions and then cause mayhem somewhere.

Meteor leaned backwards when he sat down next to them. “Feels like several lifetimes ago that you dragged me here after getting out of the World of Darkness. Hells, it has been for you.”

“That it has indeed.” The sunset turned the entire landscape into a fascinating painting of flaming orange reflected by the calm waters and the crystalline blue of Mor Dhona around it. Lakeland had been its own sight to behold, what with the clear blue of the Source and the different shades of purple from the Forest of the Lost Shepherd—but part of him always yearned for the rough, broken landscape that seemed hostile to all living beings that he remembered. While the Crystarium had been his chosen home, a city he helped build and that he saw flourish, a small part of his heart always thought back to those days that had him be with NOAH.

“That’s going to sound a tad silly, but those boxes you opened after Elidibus and Unukalhai left—was there a reason for that?”

“Mere curiosity. I had forgotten what was in them.”

As it had turned out, it had been just a collection of tools and half-broken gadgets. In the midst of that pile of boxed nonsense had been a Thermocoil Broilmaster, aged beyond belief and well-loved from the looks of it. Meteor had remained behind and said nothing as the Exarch had hugged that damned machine to himself and thanked the Ironworks quietly.

“G’raha….”

“Oh, please, do not start with that moment of nostalgia that overcame me when I saw that machine.”

“They were good people then, I take it?”

The Exarch let out a soft laugh and curled his tail up a little. “One would assume that being a self-sacrificial good person is a requirement to be made part of the Garlond Ironworks—but yes. Yes, they all were good people. As good as one can be in a world that forsaken. And to answer the next question likely burning on our tongue, yes. I would have taken them with me if I could have. I would have returned to them, I would have loved showing them what they fought so hard for. We agreed to meet again when our timeline unravelled and we were swept away by the river of time, but, well.”

Meteor merely put a hand on his head—a pat, just as they did with Ryne.

“I for one am glad you’re still here. So stay. And let’s see their future made better together.”

Just as Meteor had laughed, a heavy heart sitting in their chest as the Exarch had tried to cheer them up. The loss of Moenbryda had hung over them like a heavy cloud, and he had felt immensely guilty that he would likely add to that almost melancholic air around them at the time. But that was why he had dragged them away from Saint Coinach’s Find that one evening—to show them that sunset that he would miss for quite a while.

“’Course, that means we’ll have to pick you a proper set of adventuring gear. Ryne and I have been thinking, and since we’re gonna pass you and Elidibus off as twins either way, maybe something that obscures the lower half of your face, while letting Elidibus keep a half-mask that obscures the upper half of his in lieu of his usual mask?”

He sigh-laughed at that and leaned against them. “Must we pass me and him off as siblings?”

“Well, let’s go down the list, G’raha. Older than any of us? Check on both sides. Leaders of a sort for their respective groups? Check on both sides. Cranky old folk? Check on both sides.”

“Hey!”

“Lyna’s words, not mine! But once you and he let your tempers flare, you act eerily similar to actual siblings. So, unfortunately, yeah. We must.”

“Gah. Fine. It is not as if we do not have several seasons still to perfect those roles.”

“Thank you _ever_ so kindly, G’raha.”


	10. ACT II: A Realm Remade, Part 2

The Exarch, Elidibus while posing as Ardbert and most of the Scions had made any Warrior of Light’s story sound glamorous. A fairytale rags to riches, from nobody to a beloved hero story that many aspired to copy but very few succeeded with. In the few and far times that they returned to the Crystarium, Thancred had humoured her at first enthusiastic telling about the stories she had heard and read about heroes with a wry smile and a pat on the head. One thing in particular had stuck with her until the very moment she met Meteor in the middle of combat:

“Believe me when I say that adventurers probably wouldn’t wish their lives upon anyone else. The Warrior of Light very likely least of them all.”

It had sounded so nice in her ears back then—a person who had not set out to save the world saving it and the people they met along the way standing by their side always. She had imagined them as a flawless hero unscarred, face untouched by the wars they had changed. The person who had come to her rescue with the rest of the Crystarium was nothing of the like—most of their scars were hidden, they had long forgotten where they had gotten them except for the most recent ones, and there was a perpetual air of mental exhaustion around them whenever they thought themself unwatched. Their clear blue eyes were vacant with memories every so often; while they never treated her as anyone but herself, it was clear that they missed Minfilia just as much, if not more than Thancred.

Then, once most of everything had settled and they had been sitting in a camp in the Empty while Thancred and Urianger went to check something else, with nothing but the unconscious Gaia’s breathing in the tent, they had started telling their story from their point of view rather than the glorified story of a nobody who became a saviour.

Right out the gate, they had joked about basic adventuring being a rather dull business—the were not sellswords but could be hired as some, but most of the time adventurers took care of things around the realm that were hilariously mundane.

How mundane, she had had no idea until this very moment.

It had been decided that perhaps it would be best if she took Elidibus to Limsa Lominsa while Meteor and the Exarch went to Gridania to keep the timeline somewhat intact. Thus, after mundane task after mundane task, she reached the point where she heaved a sack of oranges onto a cart and then leaned against the cart with a long sigh.

Elidibus, who had been tying up the sacks after checking their contents, also stopped his task and stared at her quietly.

They had indeed settled for a glamour of sorts to obscure his body’s relation to Allag. He had complied with a heavy sigh and changed details without thinking about them—he had looked like a carbon copy of the Exarch for the past five seasons, perfect twins were it not for the crystal and the mismatched eyes. Elidibus had subtly changed things just enough to make them look like non-identical twins; he kept his hair longer and in a loose ponytail, and for reasons unknown to them chose eyes so pale grey they looked almost white instead of green and Allagan red. He had even complied with a mask that left his eyes clearly visible instead of anything vaguely close to the mask he wore for his office. Had she not known that an Unsundered controlled this body, she would have mistaken him for just about any Mystel—no, they were Miqo’te on the Source—that she could have run into in the Crystarium.

“You expected this to be more exciting, did you not.” It was not a question, and she saw a surprisingly genuinely amused smile on his lips as he leaned against a tree. They looked like a pair of hired hands taking a small break in the warm afternoon sun of La Noscea, not like the Oracle of Light and the Emissary of Amaurot. “It is so easy to appeal to common mortal desire with stories of grandeur come from small tasks, but when faced with those small tasks, many break. I doubt you will, but I reckon compared to your grand adventures as you saved the First from dark Ascian machinations this appears to be hilariously mundane.”

She shook her head. “I knew it would be mundane, but this is… more mundane than I believed it would be.”

His eyes lacked the warmth of the Scions’, but his smile was genuine rather than sarcastic compared to Emet-Selch’s. Rather than say anything else, he moved to mess with the sack some more. It made for an interesting dissonance; she was hauling sacks of oranges on a cart with a person who had been poised to kill them with one final, triumphant strike and had been interrupted by a literal worst case scenario for both sides of the conflict. As much as Emet-Selch had spoken, even after five seasons most of Elidibus remained a mystery.

Just the fact that he was not opposed to harsh physical work had been a surprise, especially given that he could so very easy snap his fingers and get the work to do itself.

“You sound like someone who has done their fair share of mundane work, Emissary,” Ryne said cheerfully and pushed herself off the cart’s side to grab the sack he shoved into her direction.

“Perhaps I have, perhaps I have not. Worry about the oranges rather than me, Oracle,” he replied flatly.

Yes, an adventurer’s life was insanely mundane. Moreso than she could have ever believed. Meteor had been right—but misery wanted company, and at least she had that. Even if there were millions of souls better to suffer with than Elidibus.

If all went according to plan, then perhaps this would sound just as great to another child on the Source as Meteor’s story had sounded to her back on the First.

* * *

Technically, she had been prepared. It was inevitable that they would run into her, but as another task saw them to check out a cave with a shrine in it, Ryne found that seeing a younger Y’shtola was more than passing strange. The ensuing brawl with a Gobbue and some errant souls did little to ease her confusion; while Elidibus remained focused on the targets and sent them flying with shocking precision, Ryne was unable to focus while Y’shtola barked commands at the adventurers.

She was rather glad it wasn’t Thancred, but she still spaced out for most of the conversation Elidibus had with Y’shtola. Only when she was addressed did she snap out of the reminiscing about how the woman she had gotten to know was no longer there and she would have to get to know her all over again now.

“B-Beg your pardon?”

“Hmm,” Y’shtola hummed and tilted her head a little. At the very least her playful smile remained the same over the years—it was like staring into an eerie mirror. “I asked if you were feeling quite alright, adventurer. You appear to be rather out of it.”

Ryne laughed awkwardly and rubbed the back of her neck. “Ah, uh. Yes. Yes, I am perfectly fine, all thanks to your timely intervention, Miss Conjurer.”

A hearty chuckle rang through the cave—an achingly familiar sound. “Why, what a polite young lady. Make certain the two of you get a glass of water once you return to your employer—not mead, perhaps with a bit of La Noscea’s famous orange juice mixed in. The last thing you two want is to collapse from dehydration after an unexpected fight. Perhaps we will cross paths again, adventurers.”

They both watched Y’shtola leave, and Elidibus narrowed his eyes a little as she left. Once she was gone he closed them and shook his head.

“You will need to work on that sentimentality around your former and soon to be once more allies, Oracle. You cannot let that impede your dedication to the cause or to progress in our quest.”

“… Now I know you speak from experience, Emissary. Please, do enlighten me—how did you and the other two manage to remain so… focused?”

He snapped his eyes open, pale silver almost glowing like a blaze of fire in the sunset light that fell into the cave. He did not so much as look at her when he started moving towards the exit, a dangerous silence hanging around him.

She followed, quietly, as they crossed the meadows and started the climb back up to Summerford on the hill. The dusty roads made her realise just how dry her throat was, and she watched a farmer pass them on their cart with their Chocobo warbling as the farmer made certain to ignore the pair of adventurers trudging their way up the hill.

“The Tempering, I presume,” Elidibus eventually said halfway up the hill, when Ryne had long forgotten what she had asked a bell ago. “Someone needed to focus, and because of their failure to do so I did in their stead because that is what Zodiark would have wanted me to do. So every passing, slandered and torn soul that reminded us of home I pushed aside, again and again even as the constant glare of light slowly but steadily drove the other two insane. So long as we succeeded all those passing, fleeting people we once knew and still tried to know despite the fact they were strangers… they would be our neighbours and acquaintances again. Once the skies darkened… once the blight of light had been purged. So I saw not familiar faces—I saw monsters, mockeries of what Zodiark had saved. I presume that is what every Tempered soul sees in those that are not under their deity’s thrall, even if ours is comparatively more dormant.”

When the Scions had still been on the First, he had plain refused to acknowledge them as anything but annoying pests that bothered him and his plans. Even after he failed to prevent the Scions’ return to the Source, Elidibus refused time and time again to disclose anything at all.

This had to be the first time she heard him speak about anything without indifference or low contempt. Not even when he triumphed had he sounded this genuine—his gloating had been empty, just as his eyes had been as Ardbert.

“Make no mistake, I hold no love for this ‘Eorzea’ as mortals call it. Nor can I claim to be without fault even if I consider my crusade morally correct. But you would do best if you discarded any attachments to the people you once knew and started viewing them as strangers. Reminiscing about the past in that way makes you more prone to failing to notice dangers in the present. It was that very nostalgia that saw Emet-Selch undone more than the Warrior of Light defying all mortal reason.”

He fell silent again, and by the time they arrived at Summerford once more the sun had set. Their employer, a Roegadyn man she had forgotten the name of already, apologised almost profusely for the inconvenience and thanked them immediately afterwards for their service.

She stared at her glass of water intently. Elidibus had deliberately chosen a table far from the centre of the bar they wound up in together and while she was thinking he dealt with the people attempting to chat them up. She lost track of time as she pondered on his words—how could she view the Scions as strangers when she knew just how furious Y’shtola could get when something refused to go the way she wanted it to? How could she pretend that Urianger was someone she didn’t know when she had listened to him talk about inconsequential things for an age and a half with more passion in his voice than anyone else she knew? How Thancred started bouncing his leg when he was bored and sitting somewhere, how Alisaie was shockingly efficient in a conversation, how Alphinaud more often than not could be found sitting somewhere in silence, with a Carbuncle in his lap and scratching it behind the ears while staring into the distance blankly?

She wouldn’t be able to let go of that nostalgia.

Ryne sighed heavily as Elidibus very brusquely told a Hyur to buzz off. She barely caught what was going on in that conversation—the Hyur said something about “the little missy agreein’ to” Elidibus needing to… get laid?

Ah.

Even if she were to be caught up in nostalgia, she wasn’t in this alone. Misery wanted company—and she put on her best sly Thancred-style smile as she nodded at the drunk Hyur and said that perhaps her partner in crime did need to get laid, cute as he was and all that. If Elidibus was going to make her misery worse by being himself, she was going to make his misery worse by channelling the nostalgia into being as much of a nuisance as she could. 

* * *

She would have expected her first encounter with an Ascended to be more… intimidating. Unukalhai did not exactly count, and Emet-Selch and Elidibus were Unsundered and therefore a different calibre according to Meteor’s exasperated explanation one evening. After following a nonsensical plot about something or other involving pirates, Ryne and Elidibus wound up in a cove trying to save the people who had caused this mess in the first place.

The Echo gave her a dim warning; something dark was in this place and not even a moment later she caught a familiar coat out of the corners of her eyes. A mage, Elidibus hissed lowly, a lesser Ascended most definitely serving under Lahabrea to sow as much unrest as they could in order to further destabilise the already fragile peace of the Source. Considering how Emet-Selch had directly challenged them to proving their worth and how Elidibus had fought as dirty as he could only to beat them fair and square, she had expected this Ascended to also challenge the pair of adventurers without as much as a second thought.

The Golem that they sent after her and Elidibus was almost… comically weak. She understood in theory how having the Echo had made it easier for Meteor to react in advance, even when she counted out the fact that she was trained, this thing should not have caused much harm to anyone vaguely able to keep their focus in battle.

But… most people in Eorzea did not know that. Those with enough brass might have challenged it when brought to intimidate them, but the commonfolk were not likely to beat a thing like that. Even most greenhorn adventurers would struggle with it, since many of them started solo like Meteor did but without the Echo, and the groups were not trained and experienced with how the others fought like the Scions were.

It seemed almost cowardly of that Ascended to throw a Golem at them and then leave without challenging them, but Elidibus pat down his adventuring robes and started frowning into the direction the Ascended likely fled into.

“Say, Oracle. Entertain me for one moment—would you consider this method of causing unrest efficient?”

She crossed her arms. “Eh… maybe? Like, I don’t know how the Source operates and all that. But I suppose keeping the commonfolk nervous and scared is one way of ensuring nothing gains enough power to actually… fight back. This more felt like… someone or something stalling for time.”

Elidibus also crossed his arms and nodded. Whatever was going through his head, he did not intend to share it with her.

* * *

Meteor let them know over linkshell that they would be arriving in Limsa sooner rather than later. They had a missive for the Admiral, and according to them it was also about time for a group of pirates to cause trouble together with a bunch of tempered Sahagin. Which, in turn, was the path straight to the Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

Y’shtola had departed after a second encounter with the same Ascended that resulted in them being slain with a mysterious smile on her face, claiming that perhaps their paths would cross again if the Twelve were kind. She had studied the history books together with the Exarch rather intently, desperately trying to see where they could loop in the slightest of changes without jeopardising the rebirth of the realm. If the Ascians were stalling for a little time, it seemed as if Lahabrea’s plot proceeded apace, something that worried her more than she liked to admit.

She could deal with Emet-Selch. Hells, she was rather certain that if she had been given the opportunity, she could have marched straight into the imperial throne room and made the elusive Ascian join their cause from the word go. He longed for entertainment from the mortals he considered irrelevant, and by the seven hells themselves she knew Meteor could offer it. After all he had been interested in them first and foremost.

But Lahabrea?

Other than everyone speaking ill of the dead, all she knew about him were stories. Stories that admittedly painted him as unpredictable and unstable—frankly insane, as Thancred had put it. Though she knew the outcome of his plot—a humiliating defeat at the hands of Meteor, leading down a path that ended with him all but erased from existence—she could not help but worry about how knowing about it and having more than one person involved would change the outcome. 

If he truly did not care because he was too lost in his insanity, then nothing would change. If he had even the slightest bit of awareness, perhaps being more than one person would change his approach ever so slightly. And his approach had already involved the slaughter of nearly the entire order when he sent the Garleans to capture the leading Scions and kill the rest.

Elidibus adjusted his mask a little and leaned heavily onto the table.

As far as everyone was concerned, they were a pair of adventurers waiting for their companions not a pair of Ascians commandeering the body of a young scholar and a corpse. They were what they would eventually try to hunt down. The hilarious irony of that did not escape her in the slightest; technically speaking she should have bee working against the people who had saved her life.

“A penny for your thoughts, Oracle,” he said, a perfectly neutral expression on his face.

“The Speaker.”

Surprisingly enough, people bought into them using a strange set of nicknames for one another. Some other fledgling adventurers said that perhaps a code name like that was not a bad idea, even if the choices Emissary and Oracle were a tad weird. To which Elidibus merely dryly replied that ‘Emissary’ sounded less strange when put right next to his _brother’s._ For all intents and purposes, and though it had taken several seasons to get them to that point, the Exarch and the Emissary had agreed on playing a pair of twins.

“Mrhm. And why, pray tell, is the Speaker occupying your thoughts?”

In public like this she could not exactly speak plainly. Ryne pinched the bridge of her nose with a wary sigh and leaned backwards in the chair she was sitting on slightly. This place was horribly crowded and made the Wandering Stairs seem like an empty plaza in comparison. “I wonder—how liable to changing his approach is he when faced with a bigger number of enemies?”

For a moment time seemed to stand still. Despite the busy midday crowd in the Drowning Wench, despite the cries of seabirds and the bustle of Limsa Lominsa in a realm slowly recovering from calamity, it felt as if for a singular moment all held its breath to await the Ascian’s answer.

All Elidibus was sit back up straight, folding his hands neatly and closing his eyes with a small but knowing smile ghosting over his face before it fell back into neutrality.

“I see. Rest assured that the Speaker is a stubborn old man and will very much brute-force his way through a larger than anticipated obstacle. The times he thought about it long and hard are long gone—why waste precious time on something that does not withstand enough blunt reasoning? Or… blunt bludgeoning if it is an immovable object.”

She tried to imagine that for a moment—Thancred in black Ascian robes like Emet-Selch had worn before he faded, tearing a hole into a wall with his bare hands because it just so happened to be in his way. Somehow… somehow that seemed to overlap with what the Scions knew about Lahabrea.

She must have let out a giggle because Elidibus snorted slightly and rolled his eyes. “Do not forget, he considers himself infallible. Undefeatable. What difference makes one more minor nuisance on the road he travels, when at the end of that road he can apologise to the people who matter to him?”

What went unsaid was the literal pile of corpses that Lahabrea left in his wake to achieve just that.

Though all signs pointed to him not being a problem in the way of preserving history’s flow, she made a mental note to worry about him once he became relevant.

First, they would need to travel down the road of becoming Warriors of Light. And that road led to the Scions, to the Bowl of Embers, to the Grand Companies and all the tragedy that would come after. She waved to the Exarch and Meteor who entered the Drowning Wench.

She would worry about the present rather than an undefined future for the time being. The other three cared enough about the past and the future to cover for her, after all.


	11. ACT II: A Realm Remade, Part 3

He remembered the campfires in the middle of nowhere just as clearly as he remembered the very moment he looked at NOAH on the other side of the door and told them to come no closer. It had been heartbreaking to see his second home ravaged and left an inhospitable mess, but the few campfires they set up together with other travelling groups promising to keep one another safe for a night were a clear memory that would never leave him for the rest of his life.

Most of the stories told at those campfires were about days bygone, especially once the travellers were recognised as part of the Ironworks. The Exarch had listened to the same story told hundreds of times by different people from different backgrounds, until he knew every beat of it by heart and then read it all over again in the history books the Ironworks and he collected as they travelled a realm forsaken. He knew what awaited around most bends of the road, which job in particular would prove troublesome and lead them straight into the arms of Papalymo and Yda, into am ambush set by Ixal, straight into Eorzea at large.

It made the whole ordeal no less exhausting, he groaned as he slumped onto a table—Meteor only laughed and ordered two pints of ale.

For what was supposed to be a calm forest city state recovering from a calamity with the threat of Greenblight just around the corner at any given moment, Gridania seemed to be bursting with people. Meteor laughed and said that it was because of the soon to be held celebrations that they would have to inevitably take part in if history really did go the same way as always.

“Not as grand as you imagined it to be, isn’t it?”

“Please,” he groaned. “I never believed it to be grand or glamorous. It just is—“

“Bland, exhausting, mundane and frankly you feel sort of like a used rag tossed into a dirty bucket and left to dry and stink out in the sun.”

“… Precisely.”

All they did was laugh. Loudly. It was perhaps the most genuine-sounding laugh he had heard out of them ever since their arrival on the First. History lived often broke something about the involved people, and Meteor had lost the youthful joy for adventure just as he had lost it over the years of being the Exarch. Being back in these times, back in their old body before they had been run through by Elidibus, before their skin cracked under the sheer amount of light they had absorbed, before they had walked through all hells and came out still swinging, somehow seemed to bring a spark of life they had lost back to them.

The evening was a blur to him mostly, with Meteor immediately acting just as an adventurer their age should have. Loud, proud, full of life despite this being a world recovering from the brink. In a sense, this stale ale was not so different from the still and equally stale water they shared at the campfires after the Eighth Calamity. What were the tales of old heroism if not Meteor’s over-the-top retelling of what nonsensical pest eradication mission they had been sent off to for most of the day? The other adventurers laughed along and started telling their own nonsensical tasks in equally rousing tales, and the Exarch nodded along gently, a smile on his lips.

Elidibus had set off with a mask to cover his upper face—the Exarch in turn had had to fall back to bandages to cover up the crystal creeping up his face after all. The rest was expertly hidden beneath unnecessarily much clothing and gauntlets. They even had come up with a tale to tell if someone asked about it; the Exarch had taken the brunt of a falling shard of Dalamud that had pierced the earth not too far from where he and Elidibus had been on the day of the Calamity. They had survived, yes, but not unscarred. Quite a few adventurers bore similar scars—just as Meteor had said.

The evening was still mostly a blur; the Crystarium was one of the most densely populated areas of Norvrandt, but the entire population seemed laughable just compared to the sheer volume of people in Gridania alone. Travelling merchants, adventurers, sellswords, cutthroats along with the other civilians made for a rather lively mixture.

He had truly, truly missed the bustle of the Source.

The place filled with even more people, and someone or other who worked in this place asked if there was room for one more person at his and Meteor’s table for two. Thus the Exarch and Meteor found themselves sitting next to a surprisingly quiet person wearing mostly black.

Of course the two of them were suspicious at first. The fact that a hood obscured that person’s face did not make this any better; Meteor and the Exarch both knew that the Ascended had all but infiltrated every city state in order to destabilise the places and sow the seeds of chaos for another Calamity.

“Adventurers, I take it?”

They both nodded, and finally the stranger took off their hood and shook their head.

It turned out to be a wholly unremarkable man with pale red eyes and short dark hair. He looked rather young—just about the age Meteor had been when they had arrived on the First. Where the newcomer had looked ominous before with the hood, all that ominousness vanished almost instantly once they saw he was not grinning like a devil but smiling a frankly ridiculously lopsided and amused smile. Meteor stared at him for a moment and then shrugged. 

“Travelling scholar, if I had to guess?”

“Correct! You seem the sharp kind—the sharp kind that survives an adventurer’s harsh life. But never you two mind me. I merely need to rest my legs and will be gone before you know it.”

The Exarch shrugged vaguely. There were many odd people in Eorzea—he himself had been one such odd person. But his curiosity had been piqued by the stranger who claimed that they would not bother them.

Once more, the evening blurred sort of together in the noise of an Eorzean city state, what with Meteor coaxing the genuinely quiet man into talking to them about his travels. They claimed that eventually they would have to leave the Black Shroud and reunite with their companions who were on Vylbrand. The scholar caved after a while of good-natured conversation and started talking about what he had seen of Eorzea—not much, he claimed, having come from Thanalan to the Black Shroud fairly recently after an old injury from the Calamity kept him from moving about too much.

Just another story like so many others, on the surface level. But something about the way he talked was a little too strange for a mere ‘travelling scholar’. Hells, the man sounded like he came straight from Sharlayan if the Exarch had to be honest. Thus, he leaned onto the table a little.

“You an Archon?”

It was rather straightforward, and the scholar raised an eyebrow at that before snorting into his fist. “Oh, heavens no. I never set foot on Sharlayan. Historian, general Eorzean, specialised in recent history. In simpler terms, you could say that I am recording how this realm recovers. Undoubtedly there is something glorious or terrifying to look forward to now that Garlemald appears to be stirring beyond Baelsar’s Wall.” And then, rather jarringly, the almost playful smile on the man’s lips froze into a dead stare not unlike that of Elidibus. “I would mind my own business and not stick my head where it does not belong, adventurers. ‘Tis a time for roaring success and bottomless tragedy, as Umbral Eras are wont to be. I pray you do not become stage players in the latter.” 

And just like that, the man fell silent again.

Even Meteor’s good mood seemed to have received a dampener from that.

The Exarch stared a hole into the table—and started wondering. Was this someone who would survive the Eighth? Had the Ironworks collected some of this man’s compilations of recent history? Had he taken some of these with him to the First, which in turn meant they were here now, in a time long before the historian himself would have written them?

* * *

The Warrior of Light’s first forays into places that saw countless other adventurers fail had become some sort of overblown legend by the time the Ironworks opened the doors to the Crystal Tower. Pirates as a whole had become some sort of local myth—they had been replaced by plain raiders who slaughtered without a care in the world, thus not even earning the name of ‘pirate’. A former seafarer at a campfire had wistfully sighed into the distance and said that even the curs from Sastasha had had more honour than that.

Standing in the middle of a gaggle of frightened women, however, the Exarch couldn’t help but curse that one seafarer in particular out.

Meteor had screwed up their face a little as they had passed a group of arguing adventurers near the entrance to this cave. Now they were calmly directing these women out—had even plain kicked a door down rather than mess around trying to find a small key. The women in that damp hole there had all almost started crying in relief when they saw that it had not been pirates that had come in there.

“No, you needn’t worry,” they said almost gently to a Lalafellin lass. “The path we came in from is being secured by the Maelstrom. Just go and you’ll run into ‘em, and then you’ll be free once you answer some questions. Just get going, all of you.”

Elidibus was very quietly watching this whole scene unfold, his expression unreadable as they sent the women off on their way to freedom. Everyone present was aware of what he thought about this world and the people who inhabited it—which made that expression just all the worse.

They pretended to continue their search for the pirate captain until the last of the women left the cave they were in, and then Meteor all but stomped off to the correct way forward.

* * *

Something was immensely bothering Meteor, and it was showing plain on their face. While they had in fact shown their emotions a lot more when they were younger, the Exarch had long since gotten used to the quiet, almost stoically neutral expression they wore when in public. But their scowl was deep and very reminiscent of the blank anger that had glimmered in their eyes as they stormed past the battlefield stained in white as the young sin eater died gurgling in agony behind them. Alisaie, too, had stormed after them at that point, but the Exarch was fairly certain that something was brewing in their mind right now.

All the playful flourishes they had swung with their axe in the Labyrinth of the Ancients seemed so long ago by now. The sword was very expertly handled, yes, but it carved through these fanatics with little care and essentially no hesitation.

The Deepcroft, as far as history books went, was something that Meteor had left drenched in water conjured up by a voidsent but had been otherwise uneventful. Watching Meteor right now, the Exarch wondered what sorts of ghosts they saw, seeing as they jumped at every non-human sound. Perhaps this was one of the stories that no one ever told. Something would happen in this place that would lead to Meteor shivering and wordlessly carving through every creature, every fanatic, every voidsent with reckless abandon.

He was almost scared to ask what was bothering them. Ryne, too, remained oddly silent after having been surprisingly chatty on the way to Gridania.

Elidibus, once more, remained just as utterly silent as he had been before.

* * *

The harsh sun of Thanalan was softer in the mornings and evenings. It made the streets all the move lively, but the roads that led to Ul’dah were empty at this time of the day. Everyone who had to go to the city had travelled over night, and everyone who had to take posts outside the city had already done so.

They made for an interesting sight for their fellow adventurers and soldiers on patrol at the very least.

By now he would have long expected the Emissary to start complaining. They had walked across most of Western Thanalan, Elidibus even wincing every other step and very obviously limping by the time they returned to Ul’dah. While not exactly a good tactic, Meteor had said that they would be able to take Gyges down long before any of the other gigas would turn into an issue. What they had not accounted for was the fact that they would be forced to flee the Copperbell Mines chased by survivors. Elidibus had nicked that nonsense in the bud and all but forced a partial cave-in in a dead end tunnel where a handful spriggans had become some sort collateral damage. Alas, he had been yanked out of the way of a tossed club a moment too late—while he was still perfectly capable of walking, it was not something that a handful potions could fix.

And he had declined a few potion and the Exarch’s offered staff wordlessly.

Somehow, he did not feel like a hero when they entered the Quicksand. Meteor was tense once again as they approached the Roegadyn who had asked for their help to report the deed had been done. The Exarch did not miss the extremely worried glance they threw at Elidibus as he very quietly leaned against the wall and leaned onto one side.

If he remembered the history books correctly, what was coming up was not pleasant in any way. Not that it was a fight that would go down in history in any way; he understood why Meteor was worried however. It was just another case of the Ascian’s being correct in the assumption that mortals were needlessly violent and corrupt. And immediately afterwards would come an encounter with Yda and Papalymo who were technically on their way back to the Waking Sands.

He scratched at the bandages on his face a little.

After this would come the hard part, especially considering that Elidibus could be rather standoffish when a discussion with the Scions was involved. He had made no secret of the disdain he felt towards having to work with the Scions after they so callously believed they were worthy of the memories that Emet-Selch bade them remember.

Ryne nudged him in the side a little and offered him a small smile.

Everything would work out, she was trying to say.

The moment was interrupted by someone screaming.

Oh, this was most definitely not going to end well.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> we start deriving from canon arr a little starting next chapter


	12. ACT II: A Realm Remade, Part 4

“It is passing strange that She would throw Her tools away like that in the wake of Calamity—but do indulge my burning curiosity for a moment here, Emissary. Is there a particular reason for your appearance other than this discussion? You so seldom leave your lair.”

It was a hoarse rasp that gave away just how old in mortal years this vessel was. In the past he had never quite cared about it, and even now he found it astoundingly hard to care.

He more cared about the person possessing this body.

If those foolish Scions he had been introduced to recently were to be believed, Emet-Selch had died with a peaceful, almost content smile and the request to be remembered. It hardly suited the plain exhausted _ire_ his voice was dripping underneath the curiosity he tried to muster as to not clue him into how exhausted Emet-Selch truly was. But still; something had changed with the Architect’s disposition in his final moments. Something had melted both exhaustion and petty spite in a way that the sorcerer had died _content._

Lahabrea by comparison had always been kicking and screaming under the guilt and the Tempering. Emet-Selch wore both like a mantle.

What did that make Elidibus?

“It is as I said, my own curiosity regarding the vanished Warriors of Light drove me from my lair, as you put it. Although….”

This was a most delicate question. If he intoned it just the slightest bit strangely, Emet-Selch was liable to clamp up and send him straight back to the hells he crawled out from—literally. They were supposed to investigate Sylphs following an encounter with the Lord of the Inferno, Ifrit, but Elidibus had politely excused himself and told the others to say he was investigating Larkscall a little on his own for the time being should the Scion Lalafell and the cloaked Scion ask where he had gone.

Not even his supposed allies knew that the Emissary would wind up behind the throne of Garlemald’s Emperor Solus zos Galvus. It were the waning hours of dusk and none but the Emperor’s personal guard who knew that Elidibus was an ally who came and went as he pleased were around.

“Pray permit me my own curiosity, and whether you indulge me or not is entirely up to you, O Emperor.”

“How… uncharacteristic for you to not demand an answer. Whatever could that question be, Emissary?”

In the past, before the Sundering—and part of him seized up in an anger not his own—Emet-Selch would have answered that question with a roll of his eyes and a half-exasperated sigh. It had never been a secret just how close they had been, but nowadays in those exceedingly rare occasions that he came up, Emet-Selch avoided the question altogether. Therefore, Elidibus had to ask carefully. Giving Emet-Selch an out might improve his chances of getting an answer, however.

“I have been wondering—when was the last time you saw the Seer?”

And immediately, the atmosphere in the throne room changed. He did not see the mortal’s face, but he could imagine the deep frown on that wizened face as Emet-Selch remained silent. Long, long seconds passed and Elidibus swore he could hear his heart beat in his ears despite the fact that he had left his vessel asleep in the Crystal Tower.

There was a telltale rustle of Emet-Selch slumping over in his throne.

“Here to torment me, are you, Emissary.”

“Quite the contrary. You do not have to answer me if you would prefer that.”

Another long pause, and Emet-Selch’s voice suddenly rang clear and as young as it should sound. “Lahabrea asked the same during Allag. Whereupon I told him not since the Sundering. That… _may_ have been a lie. It is not that I seek him out or that he seeks me out just to pass the time like we did in Amaurot, those times have long passed.” A long, weary sigh. “A member of the Garlean resistance.”

That… did not bode well. The Garlean resistance had risen during the early days of Emet-Selch’s reign, allegedly trying to paint their glorious leader as a monster that could manipulate aether. Solus zos Galvus had _brutally_ stamped it out so quickly that it had been all but erased from history.

“Not its leader, but a member regardless. One they dragged to cower before me… which he did not. Of course, I saw through that paper-thin disguise and put him out of his misery before he could become a problem, but….”

“He came to speak to you, did he not.”

“More to haunt me, but yes. ‘There will be other uprisings,’ and ‘abandon that course,’ and ‘you need not befriend them, you need not care at all, but this is the world as it is now and you cannot return to bygone days’; all sorts of prattle. ‘All paths lead to inevitable doom the more you continue your course’. Nonsense as per his usual since the Sundering.” Emet-Selch exhaled loudly through his nose, and his tone sounded almost jovially sarcastic now. “Oh. Right. ‘Next time you see Ophion, tell him that this imbalance is of our own making’.”

Emet-Selch did not see it, of course, but Elidibus screwed up his face behind the throne.

Of course, _of course,_ Gerun would come to the conclusion that this pathetic imbalance was their fault and not Hydaelyn’s. As if the group behind Her had not sought to undermine that which Zodiark had rebalanced after Termination. Were this about the Thirteenth Shard then yes, he would have agreed that this was of their own making. He let out a strained sigh—which earned him a small snort from Emet-Selch.

“ _Hades, you cannot continue that course. I know not what it is that you do, but tell Ophion and the Professor there is naught to be gained from more Calamities. I will not oppose you as is my duty, but I cannot stand still and watch this world careen into an abyss there is no returning from._ He sounded… _desperate,_ believe it or not.”

“You dismissed him outright?”

“Of course I did. Please do not tell me you are considering his words.”

“No, most certainly not.”

A flat lie said with such a dismissive tone that it sounded as if he was telling the truth.

Naturally the one with the moniker _Seer_ would catch a glimpse of the future. As was Gerun’s duty, he had attempted to warn them despite no longer owing allegiance to them—another of his many attempts to do… something or other. They had parted too quickly after the Sundering to discern why precisely he so vehemently refused to side with his fellow Unsundered yet also utterly denied having any interest in mortals. Whatever Gerun did, he acted on his own.

An ominous warning that would have never made much sense to Elidibus back then… he would have dismissed it then, even as little by little that very abyss edged closer and closer by the hands of Zenos.

Knowing what he knew now, however… Gerun must have known ever so slightly that the path led to Zodiark and Hydaelyn rising and shattering what remained one by one. That horrid, shrill sound and the tempestuous nature of the aether…. Of course someone with Gerun’s particular skillset would notice something amiss that not even Emet-Selch would have caught. If only there were a way to nail the elusive fourth Unsundered down, he would have marched straight to him to demand answers. All he had now, however, were baseless speculations and knowing what precisely could happen if the road was not divided.

“Was that all, Emissary?”

Ripped out of his thoughts, he shook his head. “Yes. That was all. Thank you.”

“Once more, rather uncharacteristic of you to thank someone so… _genuinely._ Are you feeling quite well, Emissary?”

He closed his eyes. “Perhaps hearing that name put me into a melancholic mood for once, Architect.”

And with that, he departed before Emet-Selch could figure out that something had upset him on a level that ran deeper than merely hearing his own name spoken so casually.

* * *

“Perhaps it is best if _you_ stayed behind.”

Just that easily, he had been banned from entering the Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak. Meteor’s reasoning had been flimsy at best, but there was a rather fundamental base to it.

Lahabrea awaited within that place, and there was no telling whether he would recognise one of his own amongst the group of adventurers that so briskly strode into that wretched place to save a single Sylph. Thus he waited outside, where no mortal eyes would think to turn.

He did not move the slightest when he heard something pop up behind him. There had been a surge of energy, familiar and almost comforting but a few moments ago. Which could only mean that the party of three had reached the part where Lahabrea awaited them to sate his own curiosity.

Which could also only mean that the person popping up behind him was….

“Speaker.”

“How very unlike you to take a vessel—unless, of course, you are here to meddle.”

By this point, Lahabrea had already possessed the Scion Thancred. Indeed, as he turned around he was met with blank light brown eyes that were so unlike the stinging, barely yellow and more white irises he remembered from Amaurot.

“Believe me or not, Lahabrea, I am not here to interfere. I merely happened to be nearby after, ah, _meddling_ elsewhere.”

Knowing what he knew now, it was rather obvious that Lahabrea was drained and nearly at his limits. Getting forcibly removed and near torn into pieces by blinding light would not do his conditions any favours, and his unceremonious end at the hands of the Archbishop and the Dragon’s Eye was unsurprising now that he knew where to look. Many people in the past had described his aether as an unending dance of flames, a volcano perhaps. Relaxed until it erupted, though his eruptions in the past were limited to when his passion was ignited by something. Immediately after the Sundering he had been both a raging wildfire of anger and the simmering flame of despair. Looking at him now, there was a spark that could ignite into a fire again, yes—but it was also but too much of a breeze away from dying out completely.

The Scion’s body did not help the slightest; that man had looked horrendously tired on the First but there were shades of that exhaustion on his youthful face even now.

Elidibus had, of course, made certain to be properly hooded and dressed for the occasion of being an Ascian talking to another Ascian rather than an adventurer allied with the Scions. He had never quite learned just how much the Scion Thancred retained from his possession, but he was not going to risk their operation by accidentally letting Lahabrea see what precisely one of the future Warriors of Light was. 

“How very unlike you to stay and humour Denizens of Light,” he drawled and gestured vaguely into the direction of Toto-Rak.

“While in motion at the time and unable to be stopped, a Denizen of Light this early after the Ardor can only mean that Hydaelyn’s powers surged, then waned. Especially after She lost the last pack of pitiful Warriors of Light. And true to that, two of these mortals but brimmed with a light not meant for their feeble hands.”

It would not be long until unprecedented losses would hit them. Emmerololth would fall to her own greed, Lahabrea’s folly would see Fandaniel and Deudalaphon slain by Gaius van Baelsar on a rampage of revenge, Nabriales and Igeyorhm would be slain by the Warrior of Light of the Source while Mitron and Loghrif would die apart on the First, and then finally Lahabrea himself would wind up torn to shreds and consumed to feed not one but two Primals.

As Pashtarot had so very dryly remarked before Elidibus set out for the First, something had gone impressively wrong if that Warrior of Light could flatten even an Unsundered like that. _Especially_ an Unsundered, had come the faint complaint from Altima. 

“And you would let them live, so the feeble hands may learn how to harness the light?”

Lahabrea waved a hand through the air. “Whether they survive or not—there are plans in motion to see the Scions of the Seventh Dawn slain and shattered, and from there on out it is but a matter of directing van Baelsar and the Ultima Weapon to victory. Indeed, even should the unthinkable happen and they survive that long, even should the shields fall and even the Blessing of Light be granted to them—“

“You mean to unleash Ultima via means of feeding the Heart of Sabik.” Perhaps he wanted some sort of reaction other than the complete apathy Lahabrea displayed—but Elidibus felt his stomach twist a little as his fellow Unsundered merely blankly blinked at him.

“Indeed I do. So cease your worrying, Emissary—the situation is perfectly under control.” The Speaker closed his eyes. “Not that the young ones such as you ought to be involved in this mess anyway. Return to your history board, Elidibus, it is where your head is best used. It should not be long before Emet-Selch’s duty is done. Let him rest a while—I will see that Eorzea remains under control.”

And without even awaiting an answer, Lahabrea vanished.

“Stubborn old man,” Elidibus hissed and instead hopped on down to await his _companions._

* * *

Lahabrea being in control of a Scion presented another issue.

Thus, thanks to the quick thinking of the local fauna, they had an excuse as to why Meteor and Oracle reported alongside Yda and Papalymo, while the brothers Exarch and Emissary were conspicuously absent.

He let out a loud hiss of pain when the Exarch attempted to slather some sort of herbal remedy on the wound.

“Wicked white, hold still! You are making this worse for yourself!”

“You may—ah—as well drive your—bloody hells—weapon through my—no—heart and move on! Ow! How should I have—cease this—known that there was a—I said cease—fawn nearby and that the—owowow—bloody deer of the bloody Shroud—gah—would _gore me_?”

The Exarch let out a frustrated hiss. “Stop squirming, idiot!” 

This was humiliating on levels that he could not put into words, but eventually the Exarch won their little war by all but sitting on his legs and forcefully slapping it on the wound. After that he started healing; he claimed that this was going to help speed the process along.

It was barbaric—not even being forced into trying some sort of herbal remedy by Altima had been that painful, and he had quite often wound up bleeding in her office after angering something or other in the Words of Lahabrea prior to becoming his predecessor’s student.

“Stop pouting.”

“I am not pouting.”

“Well, stop brooding then. Whatever it was that you were doing, you are very obviously thinking about something. Mind sharing your thoughts or are we going to sit here in miserable silence until we tackle the Lord of Crags, Emissary?”

“I would have already questioned that before any of this, but after this agony—go to the seven hells you and your mortals so like calling upon.”

“… That is a surprisingly fair point. Very well.”

The fact that the Exarch stopped arguing or trying to pry information out of him was almost concerning. For a long time it was quiet.

The sun was in fact setting and they remained in the room that the group had gotten for the night from Momodi on their own. Whatever the Warrior of Light and the Oracle of Light were doing, it was taking quite a while. It was ill-advised for many mortals but there was not a doubt that those two could at least teleport from Vesper Bay to Ul’dah’s aetherite plaza, no matter how much money that would eat up. Even just the fact that mortals demanded money for aethernet upkeep was _ridiculous._

But, no matter how many times he tried to get mad about something mortal, his thoughts always circled back to Emet-Selch and Lahabrea. He had all but sent Lahabrea off to certain death after the man defied his Tempering the slightest bit. He had not been ready for on-field deployment and yet Elidibus had let him go with a false smile and simmering anger after correcting him. Emet-Selch meanwhile had also been drained—not of his powers, no, but mentally.

“Emissary.”

“I will not answer you.”

“You have made that much clear.” The Exarch sighed and stretched to mess with the remnant of the bandages he had wrapped around the Emissary’s abdomen earlier. “You went to talk to Emet-Selch, did you not? Not to ask him to join us, but to get an answer for something you were wondering about. And the answer you received was not exactly what you expected. Yes or no?”

“….”

The Exarch sighed. “Fine then. Keep your secrets.”

* * *

The horror story that Meteor had told them about this particular leg of the journey still rung in his ears, which he flattened against his head. This nonsense with Titan had been to measure Meteor’s worth, seeing as they would likely march alone into the heart of Kobold territory with Y’shtola securing their escape route.

Thus he cleared his throat rather loudly when the suggestion to find the other survivors of the ‘Company of Heroes’ cropped up. All eyes turned to him—and he made a point in straightening his ears back up and smiling as warmly as he could muster.

“Surely Meteor and Oracle can handle this. If you ask my humble opinion, it would be best if we divided our manpower and had me and Exarch do what we do best—matters more… aetherially sensitive.”

“What,” the Exarch and Meteor both deadpanned, but Ryne clapped her hands together.

“Why, yes. Except I would leave the Company of Heroes to Meteor and Exarch. Exarch especially would be thrilled to meet these people, but you cannot be allowed to go without someone protecting you after you had your brush with death like that.”

Y’shtola shook her head. “I cannot have you prancing in and about U’Ghamaro like it is nothing—t’would be tantamount to suicide.”

Elidibus shook his head. “No one will be prancing in and about any sort of beastmen stronghold.”

The look the other three nailed him with was one of distrust. 

He shrugged weakly. “I should not go prancing through the countryside either. I would merely see if Upper La Noscea and the proximity to U’Ghamaro does not yield some sort of effect. Worst comes to worst, there is always Camp Overlook or Camp Bronze Lake should the aether lead me further down the mountains.” 

Archon Y’shtola crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes a little. Her ears gave away that she was nowhere near as mad as she looked, however. For a long moment it was quiet—then she put on a surprisingly soft smile. “Well, I cannot deny that this would be immensely helpful. It would keep you from getting further injured if Oracle takes good care of you, but it will not impede our progress elsewhere because Meteor and Exarch will be taking care of that alongside me. I say we let Emissary and Oracle go and do what it is that he wants to do, assuming they promise to stay out of danger.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note that age-wise the unsundered in this fic go, from oldest to youngest  
> lahabrea, elidibus, emet-selch, gerun
> 
> emet and gerun are barely apart but gerun is the younger of the two, elidibus is a lot older than them but lahabrea completely dwarfs them all to the point no one knows exactly how old he is (least of all lahabrea)
> 
> (as for who had their titles the longest: lahabrea dwarfs them again, followed by emet, gerun, and dead last across the entire convocation is elidibus in this au)


	13. ACT II: A Realm Remade, Part 5

Truth be told, she was bored.

It had sounded like an excellent idea at the time, attaching herself to the Ascian to learn more about him and while making certain he and the Exarch did not kill one another. But once they had been out of sight of any Maelstrom soldiers, he had immediately departed for one of the floating pieces of rock that she dimly recalled to be called the Floating City of Nym, remnants of one of the three major states around the War of the Magi and the Calamity that caused in the end. Once there he almost flippantly discarded the makeshift mask and placed his own one on his face—while not vain enough to change his robes as well, it looked… silly with the Miqo’te body.

And after that… silence. She sat on the floating chunk of rock behind him, dangling her legs over the yawning drop below them, while Elidibus did something other other that required him to stare at nothing rather intently. Urianger often had looked the same when he focused on something, so Elidibus was very likely working some sort of aetheric nonsense, but she would have very much preferred him to talk to her.

After a few hours in utter silence, when Ryne finally was nodding off peacefully, Elidibus cleared his throat.

“Mhm?”

“Pray excuse me, Oracle, but there is something I wish to know and would require your assistance with something related to this depending on your answer.”

Ryne stretched and yawned loudly. “Alright. What’s on your mind?”

“Your predecessor… the woman Minfilia. She passed her powers as Word of the Mother to you to their full extent, correct? Am I right to assume that you were granted the ability to sense, if not even see, aether?”

She could almost see Emet-Selch sneering after their return from Amh Araeng, his gold eyes staring a hole into her very soul. Much later she learned that he was indeed staring at her soul in ways that she could not stare into his—despite the darkness it had been blinding, bristling with sheer but controlled power in the same way that Meteor’s soul was cracking and breaking under the intense strain of light. Meteor had asked her not to tell the Ascian about that power—if only to have a trump card in the very likely event of his betrayal once his companions were saved from the inevitability of their demise down the flow of history.

But part of her wanted to trust him after five years. Much like Y’shtola once desired answers, much as the Scions once wanted peace, Ryne found herself wanting to reach a hand out and see if he once more slapped it away.

“That she indeed did,” she replied cautiously, hoping to see a reaction from the Ascian.

There was none. He merely nodded at her, then turned back around.

“Irrelevant as this observation is, I am beginning to understand what enticed Emet-Selch into letting his sky-high guard down. Along with a mortal who defies inevitability and a mortal who defies Tempering through a profound link with the Crystal Tower, I can see why you three piqued his interest enough to get his hopes up. Make no mistake, his actions were a mistake, one that he should have corrected. But I understand.” He waved a hand through the air dismissively. “Two pairs of eyes see better than one—would you be so kind as to assist me in finding what I am looking for?”/p>

She shifted slightly. “If you would be so kind as to tell me what it is, perhaps I can.”

“A soul,” Elidibus said with a sudden drop in his voice that made Ryne turn her head slightly. “A soul that shines brighter than a mortal’s should.”

“You’re… looking for the Fourteenth?”

“Indeed I am. Knowing where he is and what he pretends to be this mortal lifetime is half the battle won. For as it turns out, he did play a minor role in an uprising that Emet-Selch snuffed out quickly. I had not even known Gerun made his presence known since the Sundering, but I suppose he still has lingering attachments to Emet-Selch. Would that Emet-Selch had said that earlier.”

Ryne raised an eyebrow at that. Elidibus still hopped in and out of their path to pretend he was still the Emissary of Amaurot rather than the adventurer called Emissary. He effectively pretended to be several things he no longer was, but hearing that he had apparently spoken to Emet-Selch recently enough to get that information was both concerning and bewildering. 

“I… see. You believe him to be in this region?”

“You ought to know how far aethersight can see, even if the skill has been lost in the Sundering.”

* * *

La Noscea offered nothing of interest, but Ryne quite enjoyed following Elidibus when he deemed the region Gerun-free and moved on elsewhere.

All those stories that Thancred had told her while they travelled Norvrandt rung in her ears as Elidibus and she sat perched atop a tree in the Black Shroud. How the Padjals were born and raised to listen to the Elementals—how one such Elemental decided to investigate the disturbance in the treetops and flickered around her and the Ascian while he glared around. He shooed it out of his vision when it jumped up to him, and Ryne offered it one of her hands.

“How very like you,” Elidibus muttered as it bounced on her hand for a minute and then disappeared.

“Huh?”

Elidibus said nothing, and Ryne shrugged.

The Black Shroud was a dazzling sight to behold. Every Elemental was a bright flare compared to its surroundings. There were voidsent out and about, feeding on aether and causing disturbances. There were many conjurers on their trails, or not on their trails as one in the South Shroud went unseen and unhindered in spreading its corruption. After seeing mostly light and where light converged into massive blisters, it was strange to see a world still in balance. According to Urianger it had shifted closer and closer to light on the Source, though the shift was hard to notice for untrained mages.

Elidibus turned his head again and Ryne stared where he was staring. More Elementals, dancing over the glittering lake next to Gridania. And in Gridania, from what she saw, there was nothing of interest other than a few souls with darkness woven through them. As Unukalhai had told her, that was a dead giveaway of Ascended souls inhabiting and animating corpses.

Beside her, Elidibus was a veritable pillar of darkness. No wonder the Elementals that came close all dove straight at him to investigate the source of darkness. Some even went as far as trying to provoke him into action, but all he did was shoo them away with his hands.

The Ascian shook his head and grumbled a little to himself. “These Elementals make it rather hard to see. Have you seen aught of interest?”

“Hundreds of Elementals. Lingering aetheric imbalance from the Calamity. About seven Ascended. But not what we are looking for.” She stretched while Elidibus waved another Elemental away with a low hiss. “What is it about them that bothers you so? They seem merely curious.”

“Childish creations do tend to be quite bothersome when it comes to actual work,” Elidibus hissed and then leaned backwards against the tree. “Aether sprites and Elementals fell under a different designation in Amaurot—Apparitions. The key difference being that sprites were natural occurrences, whereas Elementals were oft created by children testing out their creation capability. Most of the time an adult dispersed of these, but those that fled the premise of their creation numbered many. Most of them indeed did seek a forest as a home, seeing as they were created by children but were made of pure aether. Untouched forests held a natural aether balance with one dominant aspect that shifted from one to the other frequently, often granting birth to sprites naturally, while also offering more than ample space for childish games like hide-and-seek or tag. Many a forest on either continent gained a reputation as either a Spirit Forest or Laughing Forest. The former being what Amaurot called it, the latter what most people of the other continent called it. Since they bothered none, it was easy to let them be—but doing work in those forests became a nigh impossibility. Children, however, loved them.”

“Hence why you said that me offering an Elemental a hand was… very like me.”

“Mhm.”

There was something he was not telling her, but Ryne was content having learned something about Amaurot and its people. Y’shtola had worked so hard to find things, but there had been no mention of Elementals even existing in any way, shape or form. The shades in Emet-Selch’s Amaurot also did not mention anything of the sort, despite the act they all perceived the Scions as gaggle of children when they appeared there.

At the very least it seemed that children were children, no matter the state of the world. She reached out for yet another Elemental that had appeared to dance around Elidibus and her.

For a split moment, an almost fond smile appeared on Elidibus’ face. “Mind, they were excellent at keeping the balance in the forests they chose. And woe to those that threatened those forests. As much as the world changed after the Sundering, as much as their power is diminished here, it would seem that they did not change the slightest.”

* * *

The first thing she noticed in Thanalan was an unnaturally burning soul marching towards Cape Westwind. Beneath the burning soul, through its flickering, she caught a glimpse of something familiar, burning with hot shame and terror.

She remembered how Urianger retold the rise of the Warrior of Light. How while they were away with Y’shtola, the Ascian Lahabrea, possessing Thancred at the time, sold them out to the imperials and sought to slay the Scions of the Seventh Dawn before it became an issue. He failed, of course, but the survival of Eorzea was bought with a heavy blood price paid not only by the Alliance itself but also by the Scions who were murdered in the attack on the Waking Sands.

Elidibus pinched the bridge of his nose when he noticed her staring at that.

While he still was cold and aloof at times, she had noticed he had let himself get engrossed in a discussion or two with people at the Waking Sands. Many people had wondered where Emissary and Exarch came from and why they went by such strange names—doubly so since it was rather clear to most that they were experts of some sort. The Exarch and Elidibus had come up with some surprisingly blatant explanation together: they had merely set out from their homes, had cut all ties with their family and friends and left it all behind. Leaving all behind in that case also meant that they had discarded their old names, the Exarch had grinned and said that those names would be their little secrets until the very day they took them to their graves with them.

The people in that side-room had all laughed and said that this sounded ridiculous and somehow fit the pair of Miqo’te.

If she did not know any better, she would have said that even Elidibus was having misgivings about the chosen path right now. She watched that flickering, burning soul march onwards—compared to her companion it did seem ridiculously weak.

“And so begins the fall of Speaker Lahabrea and the rise of the Warrior of Light. Not with a fight. Not with defiance. Not even with bloodshed,” Elidibus muttered. “Just with him playing his first card and marching into an imperial stronghold unopposed, unfollowed, uncontested.”

“We could stop him.”

Elidibus closed his eyes with a surprisingly heavy sigh. “And what would we achieve with that, Oracle? We would merely rile the old man up—we need him to listen, not fight back against us interfering with his plans tooth and nail. The man is older than Emet-Selch, Gerun and I put together, and a stubborn, cranky and viciously violent old coot to boot. No. Stopping him from getting all these mortals slaughtered will ruin our plans and give myself away, meaning Emet-Selch would also refuse, if not lead a crusade against me. No, Lahabrea we will need to approach when he is less… electric.”

Ryne shook her head. Meteor had chewed the situation up hundreds of times over the last five years, and slowly she started to understand what Elidibus was planning for his supposed ally. If he was too violent in normal situations, they needed him at a low point. There were precisely two low points that Meteor knew of; one Elidibus had confirmed himself when he had approached Minfilia at the Waking Sands. The other low point…. 

“You are going to sacrifice the Ascian Igeyorhm to get through to him, are you not?”

Another sigh, and this time Elidibus put a hand over his mouth before continuing. “As your vaunted hero said, some sacrifices have to be made. Given his ire after his first defeat, attempting to talk sense into him then would be pointless. Doubly so if said sense included listening to the very mortal at the centre of his ire. As they explained to you and the Exarch over and over, his second defeat at the Warrior of Light’s hands is more logical. He was at the absolute low point. Igeyorhm before the Sundering was his last apprentice in the art of phantomology—despite viewing her Ascended self as lesser than that Igeyorhm, she still means at least a little to him. Bruised pride all aside, had he escaped scathed, he would have grieved for her and returned with more hatred than before. Desperate hatred.” He exhaled loudly through his nose and shook his head. “His lowest point must have been then and there, realising just how he had failed. For all his talk of letting the old people shoulder the burden, he would have walked away alive had it not been for the Primal Thordan’s interference then and there. He swore an oath to return each and every soul lost in the Sundering, but even despite all the blind hatred for the Sundered, even Lahabrea’s cold, dead heart found joy in some of the Ascended. So yes. I would sacrifice her—if that makes the stubborn old man listen to me.” 

For how vehemently Meteor and the Exarch spoke against most avoidable deaths in the timeline, Elidibus sounded rather blunt about this. 

Then again, he did not view the Ascended on the same level as the Unsundered, yet it still left a bad taste in her mouth. He had so callously talked about Nabriales approaching the Scions being an inevitability, just as his demise at the hands of the Warrior of Light was. Now he was talking about sacrificing another Ascended to get a shot at Lahabrea. Even though they were enemies, bitter enemies even, Ryne shook her head slightly and stopped staring at the flaring soul now at Cape Westwind. 

“Are you certain we cannot approach him earlier?”

“You misunderstand, Oracle. When I say we need to approach Lahabrea when he is less electric, I mean it as such.”

“Would the stubborn old man listen to a vote between you Unsundered?”

Elidibus dropped his hand and opened his eyes. He looked thoroughly disappointed as he nailed her with a stare that could have made all hells freeze over. 

“Are you suggesting we go against the timeline and gain Emet-Selch’s support now?”

“I’m not saying we require him to stop playing his role immediately. But we could… appeal to his laziness as you put it, or his thrice-cursed compassion for even mortal beings. And then you and he could make certain to rein Lahabrea in, lest any more Ascended lives are lost. Changing things in that way might prevent any other Ascian-related deaths.”

“It would also leave the outcome of the Dragonsong War in turmoil. You fail to realise that Lahabrea, Igeyorhm and Nabriales are all necessary for the puzzle—without the Lady Iceheart turning herself into a Primal like that, the seed of an idea could never have taken root in the Archbishop’s mind, which in turn makes Azys Lla and his death at the hands of the Warrior of Light an impossibility due to the path getting erased just like that. Without Nabriales to angrily wanting to prove himself better than an Unsundered, the Lady Iceheart will never become the Primal Shiva. Without that, Lahabrea and Igeyorhm’s approach to the Archbishop will never take place, for they appealed to him playing along with their plans to end the Dragonsong War as it began—at the hands of King Thordan.”

Ryne shook her head. 

Thanalan’s aether was so very barren compared to the other two regions, and yet life seemed to flourish under the unforgiving desert sun. It was in so many ways like Amh Araeng it hurt, and she half expected a Lightwarden to lurk in an abandoned mine—despite the fact she knew that only gigas lurked within. 

She noticed how Elidibus’ soul had all but curled in on itself amidst the arid aether of Thanalan. 

“They are necessary, yes, but we needn’t change the timeline too much if we just… made him aware of what was to come. You say he is stubborn—even the most stubborn old man alive is not immune to getting proven incorrect if he values you even the slightest bit.” Thancred had yielded to her and Gaia’s demands eventually. Lyna had laughed herself silly when she learned of the reason why petite and pretty Lady Gaia had suddenly appeared in matching uniforms with Oracle Ryne and the blessing of the Crystal Exarch. If Lahabrea was the same sort of stubborn and old, then enough pressure and getting proven incorrect was going to make him more receptive to their plot. “Tell Emet-Selch and Lahabrea both the truth. Let them judge for themselves whether we are correct or not. Hells, you need not bring us up to Lahabrea at all. Challenge the old man’s perception of you and Emet-Selch, make him realise that the younger ones are perhaps foolish but not foolish enough to spout lies. Perhaps Nabriales is an inevitable loss, but Igeyorhm need not die, just as Moenbryda and Lady Iceheart need not die. Make him see that his path only leads to misery and that you have a better solution, if only he would listen.”

For a long, long moment Elidibus stared at her. 

His expression was strange; it seemed as if he was staring straight through her. As if he saw someone else entirely in her place; not in the way that Emet-Selch had looked at her as a mass of light sent by Hydaelyn that needed to either be made an ally or be eliminated, not in the way that every Scion except for Meteor had looked at her and saw Minfilia. 

Then he sighed and shook his head in defeat. “You sound like Gerun when you speak like this, Oracle, and I mean that not in the way of a child who had to become an adult too early, but in the way of the man who glared down thirteen and one who had just decided to approve the Zodiark concept and who then went on Convocation record of calling each and every soul in the room deranged for assuming that he was going to idly let people sacrifice themselves for a cause that might not even save them. Very well. You have a week to convince Emet-Selch ere we need to return for the feast. Oh, but if you fail you will have to deliver the news that we need to start anew by travelling back to a certain point. Are you taking that gamble, Oracle?” 

Meteor would likely bury their face in their hands for a moment before loudly proclaiming they were in. The Exarch meanwhile would err on the side of caution; another uncomfortable reminder that the two leaders in their group were eerily alike and the two more physically inclined people hit first and asked questions later. 

She cracked a grin at Elidibus. “Appeal to either his compassion or his hope that mortals are not worthless—or appeal to his laziness. From his support on, it would be easy to make Lahabrea listen by talking into him and showing him the path this will lead down to. And as things come true more and more, the more inclined he will be to listen and join our cause. Alright. I say we will not even need a week.” 

“Some things truly never change. Well, your funeral, Oracle.”


	14. INTERLUDE II: The Scion and the Ascian

The Scion struggled against the crushing embrace of his unseen target. But as most mortal struggles were, it was futile in the end—nothing ever managed to drive out an Unsundered unless Hydaelyn Herself decided to intervene. Weak as She was, however, her interferences were rare on the Source and practically non-existent across the Shards outside of whatever petty little Warriors of Light She tried to raise.

He had been watching the leftovers of Louisoix’s little group and the Echo-bearing ones come together to form the Scions almost idly. At first he would have not paid attention to them at all, but after losing two Ascended to a group of adventurers, Lahabrea knew something needed to be done. Had he known that a Scion would willingly walk directly into his arms he would have not worried at all.

This man, this mortal idiot, directly played into his cards.

Oh, he let him know. Lahabrea was normally not one to play with his vessels, but that Scion proved unnaturally fierce in trying to fight him off. Thus rather than smothering the soul completely and commandeering a vacant corpse as he normally did, Lahabrea made a point in caging the Scion in his own body. Deliberately. With control just barely out of his reach, with nothing but the “thrice-damned and Twelve-forsaken” Ascian waiting at every nerve end and thought he tried to form.

“Invoke your Twelve as much as you like, Scion, they will not be able to send me to the hells you believe I crawled out of.”

“ _Who knows, maybe they’ll answer my most heartfelt prayers. And then you’ll be sorry, Ascian.”_

The part of him that he had tried to bury a hundred times over, the scholar and scientist who prowled the halls of Akademia Anyder beside his own phantoms for countless sleepless nights strung together wondered why precisely this soul tried to rebel so much. It was not hard to guess that the latest Rejoining brought a new, therefore lost strength back to souls.

“ _Or maybe you’re just bloody tired, Ascian. Your guard is down.”_

“Thank you ever so kindly for alerting me of that, Scion.”

A dull curse, and then thankfully the Scion fell silent. He had no way of knowing just how much information the man had pried from him—but if he only commented on the exhaustion, Lahabrea figured that it could not have been much.

From there on out it turned into a needling match. The Scion attempted to pry information from him whenever his guard went ever so slightly down, and in return Lahabrea figuratively stomped on the Scion’s head over and over and over again.

His comrades were none the wiser. A mortal or two commented on him looking tired, but not a single one paid attention to the new accessory the man wore that held what mortals called a soul crystal. Unfortunately that little accessory was the reason why ‘dear Thancred’ was so tired.

* * *

He was no Emet-Selch when it came to playing roles. Feigning exhaustion to avoid having to act like the Scion normally did while still apparently retaining his sharp mind was more than enough to drive each and every mortal away after a while. The leader of the Scions came perhaps closest to asking if he truly was alright, but she merely smiled at him strangely and told him to get some proper sleep soon.

Why, then, was this adventurer staring at him like that? Clearly ‘Thancred’ was merely tired.

There was something about those clear blue eyes that rattled the very bottom of his memory. Something that beat alongside the Tempering, the purpose that Zodiark had given him after Termination. Clear blue eyes… unremarkable face… unreasonably strong for someone so completely average….

Emet-Selch would have recognised that soul. Gerun and Elidibus too. Lahabrea remained nonplussed, doubly so when the aether of the person next to them was almost translucent. The Echo, that what by all means was Hydaelyn’s Tempering, shone clearly in two of the adventurers. But the one who said that he needed to take care of his brother with the amusing name Emissary and dove out… something about his aether was off.

Lahabrea rubbed his vessel’s temples and excused himself. A headache, he claimed.

Old man forgetting things and getting mad, the Scion hissed—it sounded an awful lot like Emet-Selch and Elidibus.

* * *

The Garleans, on the other hand, were hilariously easy to manipulate thanks to Emet-Selch’s impressive groundwork. Gaius van Baelsar was determined to succeed where he had failed several times before. Nero tol Scaeva and Livia sas Junius in particular were just as easy to twist around his finger. One wanted her commander all for herself and therefore thirsted for glory enough to make him notice her. The other one simmered with sheer rage at still being overshadowed by a very likely dead man who had abandoned post and country years ago.

He followed Gaius like a shadow, a calm smile on his face as he inspected the recently unearthed Ultima Weapon. Little did they know there was something in that machine that did not belong, and all that they needed was feed it a surplus of aether that did not belong. A spell that seemed paltry compared to what sorcerers of the past could do, but it would be enough to devastate Eorzea in a flash of blinding light—just enough to tilt all towards chaos and drowning the Source in the aether of another Rejoining. Mitron and Loghrif had reported great progress on the First together with the Thirteenth’s former Warrior of Light. Hydaelyn had sent Her call for help against the agents of darkness to several mortals there, creating a handful of Warriors of Light ready to fail their Mothercrystal-given mission of keeping the peace and the balance.

The Scion was very unhappy about any of this. Unhappy enough that even Lahabrea felt it through the walls he had built up to keep the man at bay. Perhaps he ought to destroy his soul after all—but ah, that flicker of fear there was too amusing to get rid of that easily. It was entertaining to know he was writhing while Lahabrea interacted with both the Scion’s closest and most trusted allies and his most reviled enemies with nary a moment of rest.

“ _You’ll fail, smug bastard.”_

“Says who? The Scion under my control? The Scions in a base I could easily sell out to your imperial enemies? The Echo-bearers that are but children that Hydaelyn failed to tell about their mission?”

The seething silence while tol Scaeva reported how the Ultima Weapon’s restoration was proceeding was more than enough to make Lahabrea’s exhaustion fade a little into giddy anticipation.

Soon. Soon another Calamity would leave these mortals even more hopeless than before while their mangled, torn souls mended ever so slightly. Amaurot they could rebuild once the people were back and Zodiark back in place. Just as they had sworn.

Not much longer now.

He hoped.


	15. INTERLUDE III: The Architect and the Seer

The small, overly cheerful smile on the Seer’s face was a signal they all knew meant that an explosion was imminent. It was unsurprising to Emet-Selch and Ophion as well as the target of that smile—Elidibus. Out of the rest of the Convocation, only an overly riled Emet-Selch or Lahabrea shouted louder than Gerun, but Gerun’s temper was much harder to trigger into an explosive state. A shiver ran through the group as they half expected Gerun’s uncontrollable powers to flare up. 

His smile only grew wider before he spoke, tone still unusually cheerful, dangerous even. “You’re bloody _insane,_ old man. My most _heartfelt_ congratulations, I did not think that possible at all, Emissary.” 

This was worse than any screaming he could have done, and Emet-Selch had witnessed many a shouting match between Elidibus and Gerun to begin with, long before Gerun ever was given the title. Their relationship had always been a strained one thanks to what Ophion always called “accidental neglect and verbal abuse” when asked about why those two refused to get on even ground.

“Just the fact that you dragged me into this despite me already having resigned and any concerns about this having been settled with Deudalaphon merely cements once more just how the city means so much to you that you fail to remember the _finer details._ Yes, it remains insane. No, I will not be assisting the Convocation. I technically have not the right to claim the title Seer still. No, I will not be returning to my post afterwards even. And the unasked question that still lingers in your aether, coiling in and about and lashing out: Never. I walked out as soon as I was of age for a reason and not even you being on your self-imposed deathbed will make me change my stance on that matter, _father.”_

Gerun continued smiling like a dangerous predator as he stood back up and all but tore his civilian mask from his face. His pale red eyes almost glowed—but staring at his aether, Emet-Selch saw that it was shining with utter fury. Blank, empty fury that he had raised for years to mend over the cracks of a child that had witnessed its family falling further and further apart from the very moment it was born. Emet-Selch remembered that almost painful confession Gerun had given when they had been children standing on top of the roof, with his arms wide open and a sad smile on his face.

“They fight and they fight and they _fight,_ Hades, and there is no sign of them stopping. One loves the city more than anything else in the world, the other loves its inhabitants so much she would give anything to see them safe—and in between all that conflict, they just so happen to forget they have me until the very moment I stop being a model citizen.”

That same empty, cheerful smile was on his features again, and Emet-Selch very desperately wanted to say something, anything.

It was Elidibus who began. “Gerun—“

And suddenly the cheerful smile went bitter. Thousands of years of resentment came crashing down, and all Gerun mustered was this small bitter grin.

“Forgot my name already, did you, old man? Do whatever you damn well please to do. I will not support you or your cause. I renounced the title of Gerun, the Seer; you best address me by my name next time you attempt to change my stance or do not bother approaching me at all. There has to be another way. And I will find it.”

It was the last time Gerun walked out of the room meant for important Convocation meetings.

And he walked out with his head held high.

* * *

“You cannot be serious—are you three even _listening_ to yourselves!? Ophion, Professor—Hades!”

The world was in tatters and everything was silent. That silence was the most startling thing, perhaps. Ever since Termination nothing had been silent. First the noise, then the End—then His voice that was all yet none. And now He had fallen silence as His world was broken into pieces by that horrid _thing._

There had to be a way to restore all to His intended state. The state of a world saved, not a world in ruins. Lahabrea immediately theorised that creation that had been shattered on the aetherial level could be put back together with enough force breaking down the barriers built between the pieces.

“You cannot—I will not let you—grrk….”

The Seer staggered away from them, clutching his head.

He looked immensely unwell by the time he stopped swaying from side to side, a blank expression on his face as he stared at them.

“Fine. Fine. Do what you want. But do not assume that I will lift as much as a finger to help your cause.”

He left with his had clutched in his hands, still staggering slightly.

* * *

Once upon a time most of their mutual friends had joked about them being lovers more than anything else—unbeknownst to them, they had in fact been lovers. Even now, part of what remained of his traitorous broken heart seized up a little when he saw a familiar shimmer of living aether coiled up and poured into what must have been a Nymian corpse. The Unsundered trio had decided to create a war between three magic-based military nations, with one of them heading another. Elidibus had created Nym, Lahabrea had raised Amdapor, and Emet-Selch had built Mhach.

He was currently plotting the downfall of Nym. Elidibus had withdrawn from the city fairly quickly to see how fast it would devolve into the usual mortal chaos of murder and greed. So far it had refused to fall into that pattern but since Amdapor and Mhach already had taken the lion’s share of those, all that remained was a weak nation that was but another pawn on the field.

Gerun was inside that Nymian the mages caught and were discussing about feeding to a voidsent or using his life as bargaining chip to summon another. Little did they know, the person they were talking about offering up as vessel for a voidsent was already harbouring a passenger.

He stared at them with blank eyes, but Emet-Selch knew better than that. That was what aethersight looked like to people who did not know better. He saw that glimmer in those allegedly blank eyes that betrayed the fact that Gerun was seeing things that normal mortals did not see. The way that mortal furrowed his brow with a strange thoughtful expression escaped the mages dragging him along, and Emet-Selch continued sitting where he was. There was just the slightest shudder that went through Gerun’s vessel once he spotted the aetheric being nearby that the mages missed.

Certainly enough, under the clear skies of another night in preparation for the War of the Magi, Gerun quietly sat down next to him.

“You needn’t answer me, but entertain me for a moment here, Hades. It was you who built Mhach, I reckon; it reeks of your brand of chaos. But the other two… Nym was created by Ophion, while Amdapor rose to greatness under the Professor.”

He said nothing and did not even look at the Seer.

Gerun also remained quiet for a long time, before asking once more if all that pointless murder was truly the only thing they could do. That mortals were mortals, yes, but they did not deserve being treated as such—while at the same time he understood the agony of being effectively immortal while everyone else he had ever known was dead and gone not because of natural causes.

He was gone long before Emet-Selch turned his head to his side.

* * *

He had his theories, of course.

Gerun standing his ground and choosing neither side was odd to begin with. Emet-Selch could very openly and proudly admit that he acted mostly because of the Tempering and partially because he owed those who sacrificed themselves for Zodiark that much. There had to be a reason for Gerun going from a friendly person with the will to fight for his beliefs with tooth and nail to this… frankly confusing leaf twisting on the wind.

He tried to get information out of him the next time they met, quite literally on the side of a road that he was travelling to build another kingdom in the east that could collapse at his earliest convenience. Their vessels were perfect strangers, but Emet-Selch noticed several things before he even greeted Gerun. First, it seemed as if the Seer chose already vacated vessels. Much like Emet-Selch himself, the Seer also changed details about his vessels. Just a faint reminder of what he once looked like back in Amaurot. This time around it were his eyes, a colour that Emet-Selch would never forget.

Gerun, too, seemed to be judging the situation—a dead giveaway of Emet-Selch being in a mortal was a single bit of white hair and almost unreal yellow eyes that seemingly stared through matter as if it were nothing.

Judging from the way he reacted, Gerun had not planned on finding Emet-Selch. Which, of course, made sense. He had proclaimed himself neither on the side of Hydaelyn nor on the side of Zodiark, thus erasing all need to meet with a Warrior of Light or a Paragon of Darkness. He would have never subjected himself to swearing fealty to a deity speaking with the voice of a man who failed him countless times. But there was something odd about his refusal to work with that other deity. His opposition to Zodiark had led many a member of the Convocation and their bureaus to believe that Gerun himself had been involved with Hydaelyn the moment she appeared.

He, Lahabrea and Elidibus had approached him when the battle took a turn for the worse to make him confess that he had been behind Hydaelyn. Gerun had all but started screaming over the horrible cracking noise that rung through all their souls to a degree that still left him breathless countless mortal lifetimes later—he had not been involved with Hydaelyn, had refused the group that approached him to ask for his help. And just in the moment he was about to say who he knew was behind that mess with a second deity, the words died on his lips as the world around them shattered. After that, the odd display had happened.

Emet-Selch spent the first few moments searching for a Tempering—something may have taken root in Gerun’s soul just as the world was sundered. He looked for a telltale spear of light, embedded in the aether of a soul that was Hydaelyn returning a half-hearted bit of power. Though his own Tempering made the thought of it as something that did not belong revolting, he narrowed his eyes a little and looked for a trace of darkness that did not belong. He felt unwell, like he was pushing against a cage of glass that he had no intention of fleeing—but again, nothing seemed out of the ordinary with Gerun’s aether. Perfectly balanced, both astral and umbral, shining and flickering in a way that only souls from before the Sundering did.

The next thing he noticed was the apparent lack of any sort of emotion resounding in his aether. It was just… blank. Balanced, blank, empty. As if someone had wiped the slate clean. Not stagnant as being fully aligned to the astral was, however. It was rather clear that his aether was simultaneously in full astral stasis and in full umbral turmoil. The rest of the elements were… gone.

Perhaps a good thing—it had been both the astral and the umbral elements violently reacting to one another that had left Gerun unable to control his powers.

“Are you quite done with staring holes into me, or is my presence so offensive that you wish to send me into the depths of all hells with your eyes alone?”

He sounded… tired.

He looked tired, too. Or perhaps just plain sad.

Emet-Selch said nothing.

* * *

Ever since Elidibus had brought it up, he had been thinking about it. There was not much else that he was doing anyway. The war was proceeding as usual, the already conquered nations were silent and while an uprising was inevitable for the time being all was quiet in Garlemald.

Eorzea would once more be at the centre of a Calamity if Lahabrea proceeded uncontested—and the dying Emperor of Garlemald had the time to think about an Unsundered he had not seen in quite a while. He closed his eyes at that; here he was once more in a body for so long he started thinking like a mortal. The flesh was approaching its limit. He himself would merely move on; part of him wanted to go see how Loghrif and Mitron were proceeding on the First Shard. He had the perfect recipe for disaster; he was not going to name a successor to the throne and Garlemald would either emerge stronger or would collapse in on itself.

He snapped his eyes open when he heard something behind the throne. Only one person approached him like that, and the exhaled very loudly and very slowly.

It seemed as if Elidibus was not on his own this time around. He avoided being around any Ascended other than the little Warrior of Light.

The soul he arrived with was one such bright soul, brighter even than the little Warrior of Light. Disgustingly blinding, even. Compared to the soul that had occupied his thoughts for quite a while now, hers was flourishing under the choking stillness of light. It glimmered, glittered, shone—and still within all of that, he noticed the very clear barb that Hydaelyn wedged inside Her little playthings.

Hells, now that he focused on it a little, it seemed as if this mortal’s little soul was a _pincushion._ Where had the Emissary unearthed _that?_

“Here to torment me after all, are you.”

The newcomer froze, but Elidibus merely cleared his throat. “And as I said before, nothing could be further from my mind than tormenting you, Architect. No, quite the opposite; I am here because I was being tormented.”

A huff. “That is very much overly dramatic, thank you very much, Emissary.”

An Ascended with Hydaelyn in every free space of her very astrally charged soul. He had to admit, he was almost morbidly curious about whatever nonsense Elidibus was trying to do. He had a feeling he would know what was going on sooner than he would figure out what precisely bothered him about Gerun.


	16. ACT II: A Realm Remade, Part 6

Towards the end of the Scion’s unintended stay on the First, the Exarch had started looking both exhausted from all his research and rather sad as well. He had, after all, believed that he would never leave the First again.

“In a sense, I think I understand Emet-Selch now,” he had joked to Beq Lugg one evening, unaware of the door being open and Meteor just all but stumbling through the portal in that exact moment.

That sentence had stuck with Meteor for a long while even after the Scions had returned to the Source to tackle the matter of the missing Zenos and the Garlean war of succession. Even as the Exarch stood beside them every time a new Warrior of Light decided to follow in Ardbert’s wake, even as more and more people left the Crystarium and left the city woefully understaffed. Even as Elidibus effortlessly wiped the floor with them in the middle of the Crystarium after the public’s opinion on the Warrior of Darkness shifted ever so slightly into naming them a villain doing heroic deeds. 

They still weren’t entirely sure what he had meant with it, but it had shown them a side of the Exarch that had definitely not existed back when they had met G’raha Tia—or it had been something he hid so well that it never crossed their mind even when his disappearance was merely one person lost in a long, long string of losses that ended with them offering an exhausted and drained Alphinaud their arm as they both walked the rest of the way to Camp Dragonhead.

Something or other he picked up either after waking up or after arriving on the First.

Hells, in a sense they understood Emet-Selch as well, though it was clear that they were still missing information. Elidibus was not liable to tell anything about the other Unsundered, and Emet-Selch himself had divulged only as much information as he deemed necessary. They almost wished they could have returned to the frazzled and fading mirage of Amaurot once more to find the shade called Hythlodaeus before it vanished—but no matter how many times they went, the shade was nowhere to be seen.

“G’raha?”

The Exarch, currently busying himself with polishing his already gleaming sword, flicked an ear into their direction to show he was listening.

“You seem nervous, old man.”

He flattened his ears against his head and continued scrubbing at the weapon almost aggressively now.

“It’s the U, isn’t it.”

“It is not as if I am _scared_ of them,” the Exarch said slowly and finally put the weapon down. He raised the gauntleted arm that was crystal underneath and looked at them through his fingers. “I am nervous. Worried. But not because of the U—it is Seeker traditions that worry me. You may call me G’raha Tia still, but there is precious little that remained of a Seeker even when we met. The obnoxious youthful energy that made me send you on a wild goose chase for a laugh was all that remained. But I was more of a Sharlayan than an Ilsabardian Seeker at that point already—and if you asked me now, I would call myself a Crystarium Mystel rather than a Miqo’te. If they assume I know Seeker traditions, I will be an embarrassment and hindrance.”

It was… almost adorable, but Meteor knew better than to laugh in that very moment.

“Unless my memory has gone worse with age, I can promise you the U are nothing like that. They have their own set of traditions but they would never assume that outsiders know them. As long as you’re willing to learn their ways, they’ll hardly pester you for being a ‘strange Seeker’.”

A low grumble, and Meteor shrugged before stretching.

“Trust me, G’raha—I’d be more scared of the Scions and Ryne if I were you.”

* * *

“Trust me, G’raha.”

It was clear that he trusted them. They, in turn, also trusted him since he stopped having his rather important secrets and let down the hood.

When they had arrived on the First, they had been battered, bruised, and beaten. They had narrowly danced off death’s blade not too long ago, and it showed in the paleness and the awkwardness with which they moved in the beginning. They had been fully aware of how the Exarch watched them, likely with a deep and worried frown on his face whenever he thought that their attention was on something or someone else. Initial hesitation had quickly become a steadfast alliance following the events at Holminster Switch, and after their return from Rak’tika they had decided that the Exarch truly was someone they could trust.

He had tried to invoke the inevitable betrayal when the time had come for the light to overwhelm them. It had failed even before Emet-Selch pulled the trigger; the moment the hood came off and they called out his name in utter agony, they knew that despite everything, the Exarch was someone they trusted. Deeply.

Thancred more than once needled them in the Empty, asked about whether or not there was something between the old man and his inspiration.

At first they had believed it to be an infatuation with how he still treated them like a person rather than a blade to be pointed at their enemies. As much as most of their allies treated them as such, most still fell back to them when all seemed bleak. Nero had correctly pointed it out to the Alliance’s leaders, and those words still stung in a sense.

The Exarch had made a point in integrating them into the Crystarium not only as just someone who fought. While not very good at it, they had still spent a truly outrageous amount on the First hanging around the Crystalline Mean at first loitering and then suddenly becoming the student of half the people there. Suddenly they knew more about fishing than magic, suddenly rather than having to find someone to mend their stuff or commissioning someone for a new set, they could simply sew the cloth back together. The people called them by their name and struck up simple, everyday conversation that was _not_ about any sort of impending doom or magical nonsense they had little interest in. Even the Exarch kept talking about progress to a minimum unless something was happening or they struck up that conversation first and merely asked how the weather was in Mor Dhona, how Rammbroes and the Sons of Saint Coinach were doing, whether or not Cid and Nero had either duelled to the death or passionately made out yet—how they were doing in general.

When the Scions had been delivered back unto the Source, the Exarch had merely quietly thanked them for trusting him.

When they pulled the apparently shock-frozen Elidibus along when the Exarch said that they could retreat to Spagyrics for a quick war strategy session, they merely asked the Exarch to trust them.

The Exarch did not hesitate to take their hand. They merely pulled him along with half a laugh as they both started running past the rather ravenous Coeurls on their way to find a single Gobbue.

The Scions would have called them out for this being rather reckless; the hypocrisy not escaping any of the present people as they quietly admitted that yes, perhaps this approach to the pack of Coeurls was stupid. But with the Exarch it almost was the same as it had been back when NOAH had been a thing—they had both been younger, less worn by time and their endless fights, and much, much stupider. A scholar and a warrior was considered an excellent combination back in Nym. 

According to Cid it was a recipe for disaster, an unfortunate death in the making. Mostly because he, too, had been roped into running away from the gigas while Meteor and G’raha had both laughed themselves silly. 

What sort of combination were a hero and a leader? Not a good one, they almost heard Cid groan as they ran, the furious hissing of the Coeurls slowly subsiding as they realised that the Hyur and the Miqo’te were not here to cause trouble or to be eaten.

They both stopped once the last Coeurl disengaged and they had a moment to lean against a tree to simply break into loud, almost roaring laughter.

“That… that was outrageously stupid,” the Exarch wheezed loudly.

“But you… still… played along… trusted me! Hah! Haha!”

The Exarch said nothing as they both caught their breath, then once they were simply leaning against the tree the slowly sunk to the ground to sit down. Meteor followed suit—his tail immediately slapped the ground approvingly before curling up slightly.

“I knew you wouldn’t mislead me. As stupid as it was, I knew it would work.”

Meteor cracked a small smile and reached over to put their hand on his head. “Thank you, G’raha.”

“… Just Raha is fine.”

* * *

It struck them in the middle of a rather pleasant evening beside a campfire. With everything resolved and Unukalhai sent off to tell Elidibus they would be waiting at Camp Bronze Lake instead of at Costa del Sol, the pair had departed for the aforementioned Bronze Lake. It was a two-day travel between Wineport and there anyway, and in the midst of them nodding off slowly, their entire body seized up for a moment.

Lahabrea would have long sold the Waking Sands out to the Garleans under the Black Wolf, and the massacre there was due to be soon. The poor Exarch had no idea why their expression suddenly derailed like that when he mentioned hoping that young Arenvald’s mission was going well.

Part of them wanted to teleport to Western Thanalan immediately and storm to the Waking Sands. They wanted to drag each and every single soul out of there and ensure that none of them would get hurt or killed. Historical integrity be damned, all those lost lives weighed heavy on their mind every now and then, especially once they considered that not even those that survived made it out unscathed. Minfilia, who had never been much of a fighter despite her fervent dedication to seeing the world to a better end, wound up scarred thanks to the torture she endured, part of Lyse snapped enough that her wish to be merely a fraction as strong as her late sister flared up enough that the Griffin’s words got to her despite her hesitation to admit that. Papalymo in turn started planning for the absolute worst-case scenario that would see him sacrifice himself. Y’shtola became more reckless in trying to protect the people she considered close to her in any capacity, whereas Urianger very quietly withdrew and all but clamped up by the time the bloody banquet saw them all scatter.

And Thancred, while never admitting that much when sober, sobbed out that he spent quite a while fighting against his malevolent possessor—enough to both annoy and entertain Lahabrea into letting him _see_ what he was doing while controlling his body in the events following Moenbryda’s death.

Right now, they could prevent most of this. Hells, perhaps it was almost suicidal overconfidence on their part, but they were fairly certain they could still beat Lahabrea in a fair fight and perhaps would even be able to free Thancred that way. Not to mention the Garleans—those seemed almost a non-issue compared to the vague threat of Zenos on the horizon.

They hadn’t even noticed that they had not been reacting to anything the Exarch had asked, and blinked rather dumbly when his face was suddenly very much in front of theirs.

He at the very least seemed relieved when they _finally_ blinked at him and then shook their head slightly.

“Blessed night, I feared an alternate version of myself called you _very_ prematurely.” And with that, he sat down next to them rather than almost on top of them. “Are you alright?”

“Merely… thinking about the timeline, I suppose,” they croaked out and rubbed their temples a little.

“… Ah. I—My apologies.”

They quietly sat there for a while, side by side, with the campfire crackling as if they didn’t both know they would be returning to the Waking Sands filled with corpses sooner rather than later. Hells, having seen all those faces again after so long would only make it worse this time; and it had already been perfectly traumatic back then. They had only wanted to be an adventurer, had found a group that had a use for them and their odd power that awakened after the Calamity that set them apart from their siblings even more, and then most of them had wound up slaughtered while they were still on their way back to Vesper Bay. And suddenly it had been only them, with Y’shtola going missing and nothing but a single direction being left to them. 

The biggest insult to injury had been the fact that while they miserably dragged themself to the church to say that the Wild Roses were gone and they had no place else to go to, the Thanalan sun had burnt down just as harshly as before—but the next day, after a fitful and guilt-ridden nightmarish mess they could have hardly called ‘sleep’, it had poured and poured and _poured_ as they were introduced to Marques. Cid had reminisced about that exactly once, shortly before the end of the Sigmascape incident came around and Cid was more occupied with Nero’s critical condition at the time. How tragically cliché, he had joked, that they should meet in the pouring rain like that. But perhaps some stories needed the tragically cliché parts every so often as a reminder that the people living through these events were just as alive as the people reading about them. 

“Raha,” they eventually quietly asked after quite a while had passed in silence, “did the history books ever mention the people who I worked with? The adventurers with the Echo, the lesser known Scions, the people from resistances and rebellions across Hydaelyn?”

The Exarch shuffled a little and eventually settled on crossing his arms and legs both. With his ears drooping slightly and his eyes closed in thought he looked a little goofy to them despite the sombre mood of the campfire right now. 

Then once a proper thinking period had passed, he opened his eyes and looked up at the skies where the Bole was blazing brightly that night. 

“Certainly not all of them. While it was known that you had not challenged Leviathan or King Mog on your own, the names of these people were lost to Black Rose likely wiping them out. A handful of the so-called “lesser known” Scions made strides in preserving history and fighting back against the chaos before they, too, succumbed to after-effects of the poison or were swallowed by the tides of unrest. Arenvald in particular came close to carrying your legacy to its fullest before he was found with countless arrowed embedded in his back and a pool of blood under him—all to save a girl who, once she was identified, turned out to be the daughter of a pair of Echo-bearers who fought beside you more than once. That girl was still alive thanks to her half-Viera heritage by the time I was woken, and she said that despite all that fell apart following your death, not even when they were hunted down for fun due to their refusal to partake in pointless violence, her mother still said that she was proud to have lived that particular part of history beside you.”

He breathed in rather loudly, a sad smile on his face. It wasn’t rare for him to look or sound melancholic, but right now the Exarch looked almost positively heartbroken as he sat there with his eyes still firmly on the stars above them. 

“A young Elezen dark knight from Ishgard fought and fought and _fought_ until she retrieved your soulstone from the bandits that stole it off your still warm corpse. She entrusted it to a young Ishgardian lord whose life you saved and whose dedication to the city saw the Firmament rise before it was wiped out by Black Rose—and thus did we find it alongside the handwritten memoirs of Lord Fortemps, carefully stored away and untouched. A young Doman whose sister’s life you saved and whose desire to live free you ignited went down in history as someone who saved an entire bunch of children, to the point they crossed the Burn together and found solace in Ilsabard with a group of former Garlean Populares under one Maxima Priscus.”

He unfolded his arms. 

“Your story inspired people, but those who had been directly affected by it went above and beyond in the event that they lived through the initial use of Black Rose. At first it were their encounters with you that the survivors shared at campfires in what many considered Hydaelyn’s darkest hour. Then, slowly but steadily, people started telling these stories more and more. How you saved the dark knight and the young lord both. How you helped liberate Doma despite its less than warm welcome to you, how you offered an arm and a leg in helping rebuilding the place despite your home being on the other side of the star. How you, when the news that _something_ had happened behind the front lines, turned around and marched right back to Eorzea, letting each and every single Ilsabardian pass you as if you were not the Warrior of Light but just another Alliance soldier. How, even in that darkest hour of standing amongst your slain Scion comrades, you did not lie down and let that horrid slaughter bear you down. Instead you sought shelter, found that Cid Garlond was still alive, and sallied forth together with him and the same Alphinaud Leveilleur who would later pass away after finding you and his sister in the Imperial Capital desperately seeking answers for the Black Rose incident. Perhaps you succeeded in avenging all the people who died, people whispered when not even stories lightened the mood and the nights. Perhaps you died in Garlemald with your head held high, your weapon at the ready, and all the people who passed avenged. And even in the most bleak versions of that tale, you at least were amongst those you considered closest, on foreign soil, with the same hopelessness that swallowed all eventually burning in your soul as you died—you were never alone. Not even in death. Whether the names were well-known or not, the people knew that there were others.”

They stared at their own hands in their lap when the Exarch finally fell quiet entirely after that. Countless, countless lives they had seen lost right in front of them. People they had known. People they had not known. But as the Exarch had said that blinding day under the eternal Kholusian skies of light, they had touched countless lives. Had changed them for the better—or for the worse. Elidibus had snarled it just before all but swatting Ryne away; woe to those who opposed the weapon of light for none and nothing could flourish under so oppressive a light. Yet here was the opposing story, a story of people who did not flourish but still fought as they had fought, long after their passing, even. 

It did not help make the fact that all those deaths that had shaped their story were mostly unavoidable. But for some odd reason, it felt like someone had lifted a weight off their shoulders. 

The Exarch shuffled some more, dragged himself over so he sat beside them once again and put his head against their arm. 

“The people remembered you, as I thought they would. But just as they remembered you, they also in part remembered all those that ever stood beside you. And if it was as simple as the story of you shooing a merchant’s son along over to him, someone told that to another person under the same skies that you walked under. And it is because of that that we had best adhere to the timeline’s constraints. Who lives and who dies oft changes history ever so slightly. A few changes here and there will work, but for the greater integrity of the timeline… some… some sacrifices have to be made. Just so that history will remember you the way it remembered you after the Calamity. So that all those sacrifices will not have been for naught.”

Their siblings had called them emotionally distant at times because they did not have a tendency to cry no matter the situation. They had all but crushed Lyse in an embrace at her request sometime after the liberation of Ala Mhigo, in a place where it had only been the two of them. Lyse had cried bitter tears, both happily because her dream of her homeland liberated had come true and out of a bottomless, bottomless grief for those that had not made it to this moment to celebrate with the others. They had not shed a tear. They had stood there, bruised, beaten, bleeding still, unable to do anything but stand there with their hands curled into fists while Lord Fortemps _wept._ Estinien had merely clapped a hand on their shoulder and then they had sat down beside the crestfallen Alphinaud who, shortly before Wedge would find the Guidance Node, had sat down at the edge of the place they had landed the Enterprise and stared into the clouds below with him for a long, long time while the young Elezen broke into tears.

But right now they knew there were tears rolling down their face. Not because they were in excruciating pain as they had been in the depths of Amaurot before that shade called Hythlodaeus approached them. Not because they felt as if they had failed when their head hurt ad Elidibus in Zenos’ body slowly raised his weapon with a triumphant smile on his face. 

They weren’t even sure why they were crying—or because of which story. 

* * *

“They’re late.”

“They most certainly are… I would imagine Emissary to be late, but Oracle…?”

Y’shtola tapped a foot against the ground impatiently. She had never been the fountain of patience most people attributed to conjurers, but it was clear she was very irritated right now while Meteor and the Exarch nervously looked around. It definitely looked as if an explosion was imminent—they knew Y’shtola, and her genuinely getting mad was not something that they wanted anyone to experience. The only time they had seen her furious had been in the aftermath of the attack on Baelsar’s Wall, though her fury had very likely been her grief for Minfilia and Papalymo catching up to her at the time. 

“Exarch, are you _quite_ certain your _brother_ is not the kind to whisk Oracle away on a nonsense adventure once something catches his attention?”

“I… I am not, Meteor. They might be on one of his… err… token bogus adventures, but they could just as well have merely gotten held up. As easily distracted as he can be when something catches his attention, Oracle is also very liable to help every soul they come across.”

Another tap of a foot. Then, very calmly: “Whatever it is, I would certainly hope they arrive soon—or you two will have to tackle the Lord of the Crags on your own. We are leaving with the first light of dawn, after all.” Even her voice was dripping annoyance. 

Meteor very quickly took a step away from the volcano in the making. The sun had not risen yet, but they had not been able to sleep well. They knew what was coming up and it made sleeping just as hard as it had been immediately after those events. 

The Exarch wrung his hands slightly, the leather that covered his crystalline arm creaking under the strain. But then, suddenly, his ears perked up and turned towards the stairs that led into the settlement. 

Surely enough they saw a familiar redhead climb the stairs. She looked rather exhausted, but Ryne was there. 

Elidibus was not. 

“Oracle,” they called and she looked up.

“Meteor, Exarch—Miss Y’shtola.”

Y’shtola rolled her eyes. “That’s one. Where’s Emissary?” 

Ryne shrugged. “He’s… coming. We got held up by something, I apologise.” 

“I would hope that it was worth the delay.”

Suddenly the tiredness vanished from Ryne’s features, and a rather wide and mischievous smile spread on her face. Meteor had seen that same playfulness on Thancred’s face a couple of times whenever one of his stupid but efficient plans went off without a hitch. 

“It was worth the delay, I would say,” she said and looked back over her shoulders. “Ah, there’s Emissary. I knew he was right behind me.”

Several hundred questions burned on their tongue as Elidibus, who also looked fairly exhausted from the way his shoulders were drooping, dragged himself over to them. But it was clear that he was in an excellent mood as well. With Y’shtola around they would not be able to ask until they slew the Lord of the Crags what had put those two in such an excellent mood. 


	17. ACT II: A Realm Remade, Part 7

Emet-Selch had shooed them away and told them to come back later. Barely a moment had passed and Elidibus noted that the emperor’s grandson entered, surely to deliver some sort of report from whatever nonsensical plot Emet-Selch had hatched.

Thus they waited in a room that Emet-Selch had used in the past to speak with Lahabrea, back when Solus zos Galvus was younger and Lahabrea had arrived without a vessel.

The Oracle sneezed a few times but other than that they sat there in silence. It was hard to tell just how much time precisely had passed, until finally, _finally,_ they both raised their heads when the aether in the room warped.

He had expected the same old man that he had occupied for a mortal age and a half. Elidibus had to admit that seeing Emet-Selch had shed the vessel to appear here as hooded, masked, shadowless soul was rather confusing. Just as seeing him take and change a vessel was likely confusing to Emet-Selch, he noted with a dry smile that he shot his fellow Unsundered.

“You claim you are not here to torment, Emissary, but I still fail to understand what you are trying to do,” he said, foregoing a greeting or an acknowledgement of the Oracle at all. She remained quietly where she had been sitting. “Explain your nebulous plots, Emissary, lest we interfere and on accident sabotage one another.”

Elidibus merely leaned back in the chair he had chosen a few hours ago and put his hands together. “Perhaps I will, perhaps I will not. Permit me one more question ere I reveal what precisely drives me back to you, however.”

Emet-Selch waved a hand through the air, likely with one of his usual annoyed rolls of his eyes. But knowing him this was a silent permission to ask.

“Do you believe that Loghrif and Mitron are suitable for their mission on the First?”

Ryne’s shoulders slacked a little at that question. He had, of course, attempted to get information about how much Emet-Selch had told them out of her and the Warrior of Light over the last five years. All that they both had shared after much hesitation was that Emet-Selch had explained what precisely their goal was and how they had failed at several points.

Loghrif’s name in particular had been uttered while he had glowered over the Exarch’s bleeding form while Meteor had fought back a transformation into a truly abominable Lightwarden right atop Mt Gulg. Meteor, who had taken to pestering Emet-Selch on occasion whenever he was not busy monologuing before, very hesitantly admitted that they had cross-referenced things with the remnant part of their soul that had been the Warrior of Light Ardbert and worked out that the Ascian whose fall destabilised light and darkness so very harshly had been called _Mitron._

Emet-Selch meanwhile merely crossed his arms. “Few worked better in accord even… _before._ I doubt not that they will succeed with their given task.”

“It is rare but has happened before that an Ascended was banished to the Lifestream by light. Let us assume for a moment that one falls victim to that and the other does not for an undefined period afterwards. Is their mission still likely to succeed?”

As far as Elidibus had pieced these morsels of information together, the Warriors of Light had first slain Loghrif, the one of the pair who had specifically been tasked with increasing the sway of light. While unrivalled in both tenacity and efficiency when working together, apart from one another their output varied greatly. With Loghrif out of the picture and the controlled increase in light left to nearly uncontrolled spikes and bursts by Mitron, it came as no wonder that the end result had been a flood not unlike the one that Igeyorhm had managed on the Thirteenth by overwhelming Hydaelyn’s chosen mortals.

Had Mitron been the first to be slain, then the First would have gone down without another hitch in the plan was the conclusion that Elidibus and very likely Emet-Selch back then reached. Intelligent and near flawless thanks to thinking outside of the box—but also extremely emotionally volatile. Mitron would have rallied dark and light both to enact petty revenge, thus leaving an uncontrolled mess behind when he, too, was struck down. Loghrif meanwhile certainly did not lack the emotional attachment to Mitron, but what he did lack was the impulse to stray from given paths no matter his emotional state.

“You leave too many variables open, Emissary.”

“I do not recall you being Gerun who worried over even the smallest details, but fine. Loghrif is slain, Mitron is left. What happens on the First?”

A long pause. The Oracle shifted in her seat while Emet-Selch thought, and Elidibus himself had to admit that he was growing more and more annoyed. The damned mortals were rubbing off on him.

After an agonisingly long thinking period, Emet-Selch shrugged. “How would I know what happens in that event? But you sound as if you do. Has something befallen Loghrif and Mitron?”

As far as the timeline was concerned—he had double-checked with Unukalhai what precisely was going on where—the Warriors of Light on the First had only just about now started meeting one another and started travelling together. In which case the Thirteenth’s former Warrior of Light was still actively working with Loghrif and Mitron, and those two were perfectly content with casting vague shadows that went unseen behind the former Warrior of Light.

“No, nothing has befallen them _yet.”_

They glared at one another for a moment, then Emet-Selch let out an annoyed sigh.

“I assume I will either be told what that means sooner or later or will never know what you mean with that. Very well.” With that, he turned towards the Oracle, who met his scrutinising stare with a strange calm. “And your little Hydaelyn-infested guest would happen to be…?”

“The Oracle of Light,” she said neither scared nor proud. “An Ascended, for lack of clearer definition, very much unlike you Unsundered yet somehow similar enough to stand apart from other Ascended.”

He had not told her, of course, but she had spent a fair amount with Emet-Selch on the First. If the Warrior of Light’s exhausted explanation was to be believed, the Oracle herself had been the first to truly consider accepting his truce under the condition that he showed he was not working to undermine them by helping them a little. According to the Warrior, the girl had talked to him on several occasions that did not involve the rest of the Scions—and she was more perceptive than one would assume. She had worked out rather easily that underneath the mask rested someone who did not like unsolved mysteries.

Indeed, Emet-Selch narrowed his eyes below his mask. It was easy enough to see that he was staring at her with his eyes seeing what mortals could not. They had their means of seeing and manipulating both living and environmental aether, but the aether that made up souls remained untouchable for most of them. Emet-Selch meanwhile had been blessed with eyes that saw even the slightest change in incorporeal aether, caught remnant souls that escaped the Underworld’s pull due to things keeping them in the world of the living. A sorcerer through and through.

He crossed his arms after a moment. “Stand apart you certainly do, Oracle. Has the Emissary seen what goes on here, or has his limited sight prevented him from seeing?”

“Limited though my sight may be, I am not foolish enough to not notice _that.”_

Little had the Oracle known, appealing to his interest in mortals specifically meant the way her soul had wound up after the true Oracle of Light had yielded her soul to the girl. Indeed, she shifted somewhat uncomfortably, as if her plan had been derailed.

Emet-Selch, meanwhile, looked almost as he had before tragedy struck Amaurot and they had gathered to summon Zodiark. A young for their kind person who saw things that others did not, yet at the same time never quite suffered for it as much as the people closest to him had.

“Pray excuse me, Oracle—I believe we began on the wrong foot. Emet-Selch, Architect. A pleasure to meet you.”

The girl still looked rather worried, but managed to barely crack a smile at him.

* * *

He merely quietly sat back and let the girl do as she wanted to do. He had most certainly underestimated how much they had managed to learn about Emet-Selch in particular, even if it was clear that she still had her own misconceptions.

Emet-Selch meanwhile was more akin to the child whose family all but adopted Gerun, but rather than petty defiance whenever he dropped on by to collect Gerun and return him home it was plain curiosity wavering about in his soul by now.

He had asked her how precisely she had come by such a patchwork of a soul that by all rights should have fallen apart at a breeze and returned to Hydaelyn’s Lifestream. Elidibus had not heard that story in detail yet either, and somehow both Unsundered found themselves fascinated by the girl’s story.

A woman, called forth by Hydaelyn to serve as Her mouthpiece, who departed for another shard and who became an Ascended under Hydaelyn all things considered. But she both took pride and no pride in her duty, and then decided to yield the next vessel to the girl already inhabiting it while leaving her a part of her powers. And then, finally, at the end of their strangely joined yet not joined journey, the woman yielded her entire being to the girl.

The Oracle was, of course, leaving out things that alluded to the fact that these events had not yet come to pass. But from the way Emet-Selch was currently staring at her with a hand on his chin and not even a sound coming from him, it was clear he was fascinated by something or other.

“I see,” he eventually said and frowned slightly. “It would explain how the hooks that Hydaelyn has left in your soul and the other’s were used to stitch it together. But it does not account for what else was used—you can prick aether all you want, a needle without a thread but pokes holes into the cloth.”

The Oracle shifted slightly, confusion plain on her face. “I… I don’t follow?”

Elidibus tilted his head ever so slightly. The memories were distant and he was unsure how much of it was _his_ rather than _Zodiark’s,_ but he did remember there was something that even Emet-Selch was incapable of seeing. Something that only one person could see, in fact. And from the way Emet-Selch started drumming his weightless fingers against the desk in the room, he deduced that something or other was truly upsetting the Architect about this puzzle.

“I feel like it is not the light of Hydaelyn that binds your soul together. It is light, but my eyes cannot distinguish the finer details on that Hydaelyn-infested groundwork. Only _one_ person can.”

Elidibus could not help but let out a soft sigh. Emet-Selch pointedly ignored it, but the Oracle shifted slightly in her seat. “Who…?”

“The Emissary seems to have taken quite a liking to you, Oracle, else he would not have told you of the Sundering in such detail that you can follow a conversation like ours. Unless, of course, there is something the two of you are not telling me.”

Elidibus shot the girl a warning glance. She blinked several times and then merely shook her head.

“Emet-Selch,” she said calmly after a moment, and Elidibus could have sworn for a moment she looked like she had descended upon the earth as creature of nightmarish, rampant creation. “Have you found a mortal that met your standards yet?”

He _startled._

Elidibus did not react in the slightest when Emet-Selch threw a more than worried glance into his direction, then put up his usual expression. Lahabrea and Elidibus had come close to verbal matches in the past over things such as the worth of a mortal. They were not living beings to either of them, but Elidibus had never quite been fond of the bloodshed. Her asking so boldly about what Emet-Selch likely considered a well-kept secret in front of Elidibus surely must have worried him. But his voice was surprisingly steady when he innocently smiled and asked: “Beg your pardon?”

“I asked if there was one mortal amongst the endless waves you slaughtered that ever met your sky-high standards, _Hades.”_

The Architect’s head all but shot around and Elidibus remained as painfully neutral as he had always been in situations like these. 

“How _dare_ you tell _someone like her.”_

Elidibus remained still for a moment longer and then breathed out slowly.

Before he could say that he had most certainly not told anyone any names, the Oracle shook her head. “No, he has nothing to do with that. Just as he will have nothing to do with what you plan for your empire. He will, however, be rather involved with interrupting your supposedly well-earned rest after something you consider an impossibility happens and very, very rapidly you start losing ground to the upcoming Warrior of Light. And, of course, dealing with yet another supposed impossibility on top of several others. Loghrif will fall, and Mitron will follow suit. Nabriales will be slain, Igeyorhm torn apart—and Lahabrea’s soul will feed not one but two primals on the Source until naught remains but cinders.”

There had been people with the gift of foresight in Amaurot, of course. The clairvoyant were rare, nearly as rare as sorcerers born with an innate skill as high as that of Emet-Selch—and often considered a liability due to their vague nature. Prophecies came without warning, much as an Echo vision came without warning to mortals, and what they saw was an inevitable glimpse of the future. 

Mortals also called foresight the power of the Echo. Perhaps the first Oracle of Light had had it at some point, perhaps the girl could have inherited that power from her. But thus far few people truly displayed the power of foresight. And amongst the Convocation, only Gerun had been rumoured to have that particular skill.

“You, Emet-Selch of the Convocation of Fourteen, Last Architect of Amaurot, told the Warrior of Light that name when you challenged them to a battle to the death—in a future that has yet to come to pass.”

Long, long silence.

Then, finally, Emet-Selch let out a long, heavy sigh.

“Torment. No, torture. Where did you _unearth_ a bloody mortal clairvoyant?”

The Oracle once more spoke before he could as much as open his mouth. “In a future that has yet to come to pass.”

Emet-Selch dragged a hand down his mask. “Enough with the riddles. Speak plain, girl, and know that if you skip the slightest detail it will be the last word you utter.”

* * *

The night passed. Emet-Selch departed for a short while, and Elidibus leaned against a dusty bookshelf with a dry smile on his face.

She had spoken like a woman possessed, recounted the tale he had watched unfold on the Source and finally filled in some rather severe holes that he had about the story as a whole. While not unknown to him and Lahabrea, he would have never guessed simply how mentally exhausted and drained Emet-Selch had been to fall for the lure of a handful mortals who showed they were more than broken pieces of what was once a whole. Of course it still left the question as to what he had seen in the Warrior of Light to leave them with a simple request to be remembered—but slowly and steadily the puzzle was solving itself. 

Emet-Selch returned in the proper body he had occupied for the better part of a mortal lifetime—the girl startled away from the old emperor, but even through all that age it was clear just how furiously his eyes were glinting. As if, Elidibus thought and nearly snorted, Solus zos Galvus was possessed by a youthful demon. Little did Garlemald know that young Solus Galvus had long perished and been replaced with Emet-Selch. And the illusion was broken when he started hissing in his own voice, in a language that had long been eradicated from the Source and Shards both.

He knew that the Oracle understood him, but outside of mocking people with the Echo or conversations with one another it was rare to speak in Amaurotine casually.

“So. Unless I misunderstood what you told me thus far, you are claiming that you and he both came from further ahead in the timeline to prevent something or other that you have failed to mention thus far. A timeline where all that you claimed had come to pass. From Mitron and Loghrif to Lahabrea and myself. Hydaelyn was on a winning streak thanks to whatever little toy soldier She chose to pour Her energies into. You are _aware_ of how insane that sounds, correct?”

“Perfectly so,” the girl said calmly. “Whether you believe me or not will, in the end, still be your decision. I know I am telling nothing but the truth.”

He rubbed his temples. “For better or for worse, logically there are no significant skips despite the sheer insanity. It is clear you lack a fuller picture, but not once did your aether betray a lie.”

Only in that moment did Elidibus realise that it was going too smoothly. Emet-Selch was second only to Gerun with how prickly and stubborn he could be, and while he yielded when proven incorrect it was a hellish ordeal to prove someone with such fine aethersight incorrect in the first place. The Oracle lacked the reference points, of course; but Elidibus knew that normally Emet-Selch would be trying to tell her just how insane she sounded at every turn and twist. He had nearly out-debated Lahabrea once and only lost the debate to the fact that Lahabrea knew the intricacies of how to manipulate living aether better than Emet-Selch who was a sorcerer versed in the incorporeal.

The Oracle went on to explain that in their abandoned timeline Zodiark and Hydaelyn had risen thanks to manipulation of some kind that they had not figured out. Emet-Selch sat there with his eyes closed and his hands folded in front of his face as he leaned onto the table.

“’I cannot stand still and watch this world careen into an abyss there is no returning from’, he said.” Emet-Selch exhaled slowly. Dangerously. “Very well. Let us assume I believe you. Let us assume that I am willing to work with you to prevent this hypothetical ending. But… there is one condition for you, Oracle. A simple, simple condition. Fulfill that and I will be at your disposal as soon as my duty in Garlemald is wrapped up.”

There it was. While Emet-Selch dealt in less extremes than the two most stubborn members of the Convocation, he was known for being a tough nut to crack.

The worst thing was, Elidibus knew just what his “simple condition” was going to be. There was nothing else Emet-Selch could or would ask, sworn loyalty to Zodiark or not.

The Oracle knew that her only choice was to accept, and thus she nodded solemnly.

“Doubtlessly he has been watching from somewhere within the empire ever since that last meeting of ours. Gerun will absolutely and utterly refuse being seen by either the Emissary or I. You, on the other hand, will be rather intriguing to his eyes and thus might draw him and his infernal curiosity out.”

“If I may, Architect, I do not believe leaving her to deal with the Fourteenth on her own is a good idea,” Elidibus chimed in immediately. Part of him utterly rebelled against the thought of that girl alone with Gerun—and once more he was not sure if it was his own idea or that of Zodiark, distant and vague but most definitely against it.

But Emet-Selch merely shook his head. “Draw out the Seer. Ask him if the events you describe are the abyss that he knew the world would careen into. It is that infernal balance that he preaches that hangs in the balance, after all.”

* * *

Once the girl was gone, Elidibus let out a long sigh that had been building inside him for quite a while.

“You may as well send her out to collect Amaurotine vintage.”

Emet-Selch turned his head slightly, a strange smile on his face before he spoke again. “You misunderstand my intentions, Emissary. She will fail this duty—even should she reel him in, something about him is _wrong._ It had not crossed my mind again until you asked me if I had seen him since his departure. Should he stay away, it dashes one theory of mine. Should he approach her and give her cryptic non-answers, it proves that another theory is not baseless. You may have essentially raised him after his parents were too preoccupied with the city ad unwilling to deal with a stubborn son, but he never opened up to you entirely.” 

Elidibus twitched one ear into Emet-Selch’s direction and swished this vessel’s tail around in annoyance. “You say this as if the intricate puzzle that was our dear Fourteenth has been solved by you.”

“I loved him, Ophion,” came the dry reply. “I loved him even if his sole purpose in life as stated by himself was to annoy me and to be the family disappointment. I do have pieces of the puzzle that you lack, but even I cannot say for certain what changed during the Sundering.”

Tempered though they were, Zodiark had ever left them mostly in control of their own facilities as long as it did not actively hinder His mission of preservation. Pashtarot had to give up on his menagerie of monsters because it endangered survivors and he had been unable to refuse that call. After that they had simply ceased to even attempt to go against what Zodiark demanded, which in turn had seemingly riled up the already volatile former Fourteenth more.

His shrill, offended shout that he was uninvolved with the current disaster of Hydaelyn and Zodiark grinding everything that He had saved to dust could only have been the truth.

“… Could our assumption of him having been involved with Hydaelyn have changed him that much?”

Emet-Selch shook his head. “No. Never. While the three of us were wrong in cornering him and trying to get a satisfactory answer from him, he would have never tossed his weapons on the ground and left without choosing a side. He opposed us and Him—morally he was aligned with whichever group summoned Hydaelyn. He still opposed us on moral grounds, claiming that murder remained murder, sundered entity as subject or not. Yet… yet he did not choose their side. He did not side with mortals. He simply… left. Quietly and without any bite to him.” 

A silence that had often spread between the Unsundered in the days following the Sundering spread between the two of them, and Emet-Selch eventually leaned forwards a little to pinch the bridge of his nose with a heavy sigh.

“He made certain his departure from his home was as loud as possible as a final slap in their faces after years of enduring their crumbling marriage. He acted rather coy and cheeky for a long while after refusing the title Emet-Selch, moreso than usual. When he accepted the seat of Gerun, his first order of action was to immediately point out a failing in a concept submitted by none other than his father. He played by his own rules first and foremost, but he was not one to lay down and wait to die.”

Elidibus shook his head slightly. Every single member of the Convocation was eccentric in their own regard, but right now he hated this more than anything. A pointless quest for a girl determined to succeed was unusually cruel, which he pointed out to him. 

Emet-Selch merely threw him a wry smile. “But enough about that Oracle and Hythlodaeus—how about you indulge my curiosity for once, Ophion, and tell me what precisely your intentions are?” 


	18. ACT III: Eorzean Puzzle Pieces on an Amaurotine Chess Board, Part 1

Compared to how lively and bustling the cities in Eorzea were despite the fairly recent Calamity, the Garlean capital lay almost dead silent even during the day. Most of the people in the streets were military patrols on the way from one facility to another, and the few non-militaries all walked rather quickly and very, very quietly. Hells, no one had even told her what this city was called, which made navigation surprisingly difficult for Ryne.

She had left her body in the Crystal Tower after a quick travel back and forth; as far as Meteor and the Exarch knew there were no people with the Echo in Garlemald, meaning that she was safe from being spotted in the shadeless form of an Ascended soul. The only person who could spot her like this was the Fourteenth.

Emet-Selch had just about failed to inform her of what Gerun looked like. She had no idea what she was on the lookout for, and even peeking into aether as she had had with Elidibus before sharing her idea of getting Emet-Selch in on the plan early did not reveal anything other than Garleans and Garlean conscripts. While in the distance Elidibus and Emet-Selch’s souls burned like a flash fire in the dark, the rest of Garlemald was… mortal, for a lack of better words.

There were clear divides on their souls where they had been severed in the Sundering. Ryne had not been able to see that before travelling through time, but she attributed it to growing more and more into the powers that her Minfilia had left her. She had been able to see the divide on one soul, but she did not quite like thinking about how Meteor’s soul had strained and torn, showing clear cracks of being about to break into seven pieces while fighting back against the transformation into a Lightwarden. Hells, now that she thought about it, perhaps Meteor would not have turned into _one_ Lightwarden. Their soul might have broken apart and given rise to _seven_ Lightwardens, considering that before all people who had turned had been the people of the First who, comparatively, lacked the Rejoined parts.

Oh, this was not helping her mild headache, and Ryne slumped down onto the roof she had been perched upon to watch the place. Staring into aether with such intensity made her head throb after a while, and the overthinking did not help in the slightest.

How on earth was she going to find a sewing needle in a haystack?

* * *

The difference between Garlemald and Eorzea became even more obvious once the sun set. The city states all used oil or aetheric lamps just as the Crystarium had had, albeit a little more… she did not have a proper word for it. Primitive seemed wrong, and antiquated was incorrect. Allagan tech had been integrated into the Crystarium on top of what the people built, and the Exarch had doubtlessly spread something or other from his future’s Ironworks as well. In turn it had been surprisingly modern while keeping the touch of all the nationalities that fled to Lakeland to escape the Flood.

Eorzea lacked the First’s influences, and while she had noticed several things here and there that clearly came from another city state, there was a clear divide. Aesthetics and brightness, for one. Gridania’s lamps were a lot softer than those of Limsa Lominsa. Ul’dah’s lights shone brightest on the important roads and those that were deemed “infested” with refugees or were less important to the overall city structure were darker than the nights.

Garlemald’s lamps shone bright, sterile. The snowflakes that danced through the soft breeze that went through the capital were plain visible. It was not dissimilar to how shade Amaurot’s lights had glittered, but those had lacked the harshness. Perhaps another little thing that had changed in the Sundering—the brightness of these sorts of lamps that very clearly drew in ambient aether of some sort.

Snow had not been a thing in Norvrandt at all. The only region where it had regularly snowed before the Flood had been Voeburt and the everlasting light had made the flow of seasons an impossibility.

Seeing it for the first time during her exploits with Eden had already taken her breath away, and she understood why it was the element closest to stasis once she saw it. Even the already sterile Garlean capital seemed to fall into a stillness that seemed unreal now that it was snowing.

She breathed out despite not needing to breathe due to her current lack of a body to inhabit.

* * *

One day came and went without events. A night passed in utter silence. Another day, another night. Were it not for the fact that she regularly jumped to her feet to change her vantage point, she was rather certain that her soul would have ever rooted itself into the cold, dead metal of the capital by now. Or she would have turned into an ice statue not very unlike how she had felt when she let Eden pour that very element into every crack of her being.

The third day was marked by a woman and a laughing child after the utter, military silence of the capital. Ryne even had to blink several times before she managed to shut her eyes to the aether and instead looked down into the street.

Emet-Selch had already looked alien to her before the Scions questioned him immediately. Part of her still thought these people a tad strange compared to the other races of Norvrandt, but seeing a mother dragged along by an excited child suddenly and very starkly reminded her that Emet-Selch had truly been an alien in the truest sense of the world compared to these people.

Thancred had told her a few things about the country and its provinces, how it had risen to unusual might under Solus zos Galvus. The determination to see all Primal threat wiped from the earth seemed genuine in most Garlean officials, but something had always seemed a little off to him after learning of Ascian influence. Perhaps, he had suggested while they huddled in an abandoned shack to avoid Eulmoran soldiers further down the road, an Ascian had influenced that Emperor Solus. Perhaps it had never been his idea but was part of an agreement to see his country stable. An Ascian plaything like Gaius van Baelsar had been—which meant that on paper it had been possible to reason with His Radiance before old age claimed him. His theories had all been dashed when Emet-Selch revealed himself, of course, but she often thought about that night under the everlasting light. How strange the Source’s empires and kingdoms sounded compared to Voeburt and Ronka!

She shook her head vaguely and caught the faintest glimpse of something strange in the distance. When she tried to focus on it it had already vanished without a trace, and beyond that were Emet-Selch and Elidibus still in the imperial palace.

Likely her eyes playing tricks on her.

Ryne sighed, unheard by the strangely calm capital below her, and hopped to another roof to watch the city that never quite stopped being an elaborate military base.

* * *

“Have you heard?”

“If you start with that, there is a fair chance I have not, Fhalyhss.”

Conscripts, she figured. Something about them was strangely familiar, but all that really stood out about them to her was the fact that both of them were Miqo’te women. One’s long red tail curled up a little and she leaned in closer to her companion.

“Little red eye has allegedly been missing since the Calamity,” the one called Fhalyhss said.

Little red eye? Ryne straightened up a little and hopped down the roof to follow these two for a short while. It was about high time she changed her spot anyway.

“Uh? Seriously? Where’d you hear that?” The other one flicked an ear towards her companion.

Fhalyhss merely straightened a little in her military uniform before crossing her arms and continuing marching towards whatever base they were assigned to. “Got a letter from our sister the other day. Apparently one of these Sharlayans he left with ages ago came to the tribe and asked if he had returned here and if she could speak with him. When the leader told her that he wasn’t here and hadn’t been here since he departed, the Sharlayan apparently nearly freaked. Said something or other about him vanishing over night and no one having a clue where he went.”

The other one shook her head. “With an eye like that, no wonder he proved to be more trouble than he was worth in the end.”

Little red eye.

She stopped following the pair. The taller Fhalyhss had rusty red hair and fur, the tail in particular ridiculously long. The other one was smaller and stockier, her hair and fur almost shockingly bright red next to her partner.

“G’fhalyhss, sister wrote in her letter, if you find the wayward G’raha in the capital, I beg you—send him home to Sharlayan. Whether you like him or not is irrelevant, but his new family worries for him.”

The Exarch had mentioned on occasion that his tribe lived in Ilsabard. It sounded rather surreal to her ears to hear his name mentioned so casually by a pair of Miqo’te who clearly did not like him. Especially since Meteor always said his name so softly and adoringly—by comparison, the woman Fhalyhss had all but spat it out.

Ryne stood in the streets for an hour trying to process that the Exarch was adored by every soul in the Crystarium and yet in his actual homeland his birth family did not appear to like him much.

* * *

She watched the military procession, for a lack of better word or any idea what was going on below, with idle interest. Aether had started blurring in front of her eyes clearly from her lack of rest, but she was not going to give up that easily. Though it was slowly but steadily dawning upon her that Emet-Selch had very likely set her up for a failure. At first she had been so stubbornly determined to prove that mortals were fully capable of doing anything they set their minds upon, but the Fourteenth remained as elusive as he had been back when she had looked for him all over Eorzea alongside Elidibus. 

Ryne rubbed her eyes a little. 

Perhaps it was time to return to the palace soon and report that nothing of any sort had happened despite her best attempts. Knowing how well-prepared Ascians tended to be it was very likely within the realm of possibilities that Emet-Selch had considered. If it was not the result he expected. 

She leaned down a little. The procession continued, all weapons drawn. Perhaps they were part of a legion that was to depart for a province. There were more than enough uprisings every so often in some of the provinces that had not been beaten down to bloodless corpses like Doma. Ala Mhigo had a more than active resistance and the other provinces very likely had likewise active resistances. 

The person at the head of that legion that was marching was strangely familiar to her, however. She had not exactly seen much of the man who had roused Zodiark and Hydaelyn into action, and the face that grinned madly as he attempted to kill Meteor would have haunted her had Elidibus not served as a shield in that very moment. Ardbert’s body had died again, its inhabitant very quietly saying that he needed a moment to breathe. The Exarch, his hands on the console that controlled the Crystal Tower, had looked at a screen that suddenly lit up red—as the Exarch explained later it had been a Allagan contraption that checked for vital signs of non-chimera presences in the Crystal Tower. Elidibus’ vessel had been slain by that stranger who seemed hells-bent on hunting Meteor for sport. 

The man at the head of that legion was not the same person. She saw that even from here, and his aether swirled with some undefined thing that could only be anger or hatred for something or other while he saluted towards the imperial palace. Why was that man so familiar to her? 

“Fascinating, isn’t he, that Varis yae Galvus?”

She went rigid and didn’t quite dare looking next to her. After nearly a week of not a single soul noticing her, suddenly hearing a voice that she did not know very clearly addressing her startled her—and there was no doubt that this question was for her. After all, she was on a roof with no one else on it. 

A low chuckle. She turned her head slightly and was greeted with… a black hood obstructing the face of whoever it was beside her. In fact, now that she looked closer, the stranger appeared to be dressed in the same robes as the Amaurotine shades that inhabited Emet-Selch’s recreation of Amaurot except tailored for an exceedingly tall Hyur. Perhaps a Garlean? Or an approximation of what he looked like in the past, cut down to size to fit in with the Sundered? 

“Unless our dear Emperor chooses between his surviving son and his grandson as successor to the throne soon there will be a war of succession should he pass. But your presence here implies that there are bigger things to worry about than that petty little war of succession that only has one outcome. Is that not so, Oracle of Light?”

Emet-Selch had groaned and asked where Elidibus had found a mortal clairvoyant. Minfilia had had a small measure of foresight that awoke with her Echo, something that Ryne had lacked. Her Echo was the bog-standard version that made people receptive to Hydaelyn’s voice through the shudder of a soul that knew it was incomplete. According to Meteor they knew another Sharlayan whose Echo was incredibly vague and fast glimpses into the future that always came to pass one way or another. There were so many things about the Echo that they plain did not know and that Elidibus had refused to share. It was clear that the Ascended all had the Echo as well but it barely felt as if anything had changed. Perhaps the secret to becoming an Ascended was merely thinking outside of the box—which in turn had the horrifying implication that there had been or even right now were people with the Echo who had refused to die and attached themselves to the next person, effectively becoming Ascended in their own strange way. 

“How… how would I know?”

The hooded person beside her laughed. It was a strange, airy laugh that sounded unreal to her ears. It was clear, lacked any sort of malice that the Ascians’ laughter all carried. “How, indeed. You threw all caution to the wind before—why not throw it to the wind another time?” 

She pressed her lips together. Goodness, it was hard to gauge a stranger with a hood that obscured their entire face. And thus, after trying to evaluate the situation and failing, she closed her eyes and breathed in loudly. All she saw when she opened her eyes again was the vaguest hint of a smile that the stranger was shooting her, very much unlike the Exarch who left the lower part of his face in plain view so people could still judge his reactions a little at the very least. “I will—but only under one condition.” 

“Oh?”

“You speak with a mortal, not an Amaurotine. Take off the hood and any masks you might wear under that hood as a show of courtesy.”

This time, the laughter was louder. The stranger was laughing even as they put their hands on the hood and all but threw it back. 

Part of her had expected someone who looked more dangerous than Emet-Selch did. After all she did not know much about the Fourteenth, and whatever little Elidibus had shared and what they had learned about him beforehand had painted the picture of someone who might as well have been a predator wearing a human’s skin. But much like Emet-Selch, there was a tiredness on that unremarkable face that emerged from underneath the hood that seemed bottomless. The Exarch’s red eyes were unreal with how intense their colour was—Gerun’s eyes in turn looked like a glass of water that someone had cleaned a brush full of red paint in. She had expected a person full of fire and plots after the book they had read, or at least a fire that simmered underneath the surface of someone who vouched for balance above all. 

Other than the exhaustion, his expression seemed empty once he stopped laughing. His eyes were unfocused and distant, something that she knew was a sign of someone using their aethersight with their eyes open. Except that unlike Emet-Selch’s eyes they never refocused. They remained blank and distant as he smiled at her. 

“You are bolder than I would have expected. Knowing that you were put on a silver platter to draw me out had me think about approaching you twice over, but I see that I made the right decision after all,” he said with a smile. “It is not very often that an interesting soul is accompanied by an interesting mortal.”

She would have expected him to _not_ sound like an Ascian for some reason. Hells, now that she looked at him closer he looked bizarrely similar to the younger Urianger—shoulder-length dark grey hair and robes that obscured his face, except there was an energy to him that made him seem a lot more unreal than Urianger. 

That small illusion was nearly immediately broken when he opened his mouth again. Only now Ryne realised that he was speaking Amaurotine—the Echo made his words clear to her, but it still sounded strange to her otherwise. “Alas, I would think it best if we got this encounter through as quickly as possible. You were sent here by Emet-Selch, were you not?” 

“I was.”

“Which most certainly means that he has a question for me that he did not dare ask the last time we met. Granted, it was not a pleasant encounter by any means but I would have answered him had he asked the right questions. Clairvoyance only gets you _so_ far, Oracle—pray tell, what does the great Architect wish to know from the lowly Seer?”

He was incredibly hard to gauge. His sarcasm was clear to her despite the fact that his voice and expression did not give it away immediately like Emet-Selch’s sarcasm did. In fact, watching his gestures and posture now it was like staring into a bizarre mirror that showed her Emet-Selch splattered on top of a body that reminded her of Urianger. But it was clear that he was not Urianger—he was not an Elezen. A coincidence, she reckoned and finally shook her head. 

“I assume you… do not need an explanation of my… circumstances.”

He put a hand on one of his cheeks and tilted his head slightly. While not the same gesture it was very reminiscent of how Emet-Selch had rolled his eyes at Thancred with a huff back when they had arrived in Rak’tika, and slowly but steadily it dawned upon her that one was copying the other in this situation. Whether Gerun was copying Emet-Selch or if Emet-Selch had been copying Gerun remained a mystery to her, of course, but it was rather uncomfortable to witness. 

“The details do escape me, fair Oracle—but the broader strokes I have been watching from a safe distance. It is a puzzle, but I have time to solve it. Your circumstances, however, are clear to me, Little Miss Time Traveller.”

“… That makes things easier. I am to ask you if the future that I am from is the very future you attempted to warn Emet-Selch about. An abyss there was no return from, you called it, I believe?”

The idle smile on his face froze while his pose remained whimsical. It was such a sudden shift that her blood would have frozen to absolute zero had she been in her body still. 

“How odd to know he remembers my precise words when most of all else escapes him nowadays. Yes. The very future you hail from is the outcome I tried to warn him of—a premature awakening of Hydaelyn and Zodiark both is—“

He grimaced and shuddered, taking a step away from her. For how relaxed he had been beforehand even when the amusement dropped from his face, he suddenly was tense and crossed his arms. 

“Never you mind that, Oracle. You have your answer. Run along now.”

Before she could as much as ask him to stay a moment longer to think of something to say, he was gone. 

* * *

For all their insistence that they were nothing like mortals, there was something decidedly human about Elidibus jumping away from Emet-Selch a little when she arrived. Whatever bizarre conversation had taken place here, she and Unukalhai had both somehow managed to arrive at the same time. The only person who did not look the slightest bit exasperated or confused was Emet-Selch, who in turn looked like his nameday had come early that day. 

“Uh.” “Err.”

Unukalhai and Ryne stared at each other rather embarrassed before falling silent again, while Elidibus sighed deeply enough to cause another Calamity. “Unukalhai.” 

“… The Warrior of Light and the Exarch sent me to you and the Oracle to tell you that they will be waiting in Camp Bronze Lake rather than at Costa del Sol. You, err… apparently are late.”

Elidibus waved a hand through the air. “That would be the Oracle’s fault. Speaking of whom—Oracle.” 

“The… the Fourteenth’s answer is yes, that was indeed what he was trying to warn the Architect of.”

Unukalhai’s eyes went wide under his mask, while Elidibus merely buried his face in his hands to groan something incomprehensible. Emet-Selch meanwhile looked like his nameday had come early and someone important died during the festivities. 

“Wait. Describe the person who approached you,” Emet-Selch hissed immediately and straightened up while Elidibus shook his head for some reason.

“Standard communal Amaurotine robes, dark grey hair. Light red eyes that did not focus once throughout the entire conversation… and uh. He startled me enough that I forgot to look at him with aethersight.”

“How did he startle you?”

“By appearing next to me soundlessly and suddenly addressing me.”

Emet-Selch nodded and immediately turned to look at his fellow Ascian. She half wanted to mention that his departure had been abrupt and more than strange, but she decided to hold her tongue for the time being. There was still the slightest chance that the Ascians could betray them the moment the danger of Hydaelyn and Zodiark rising prematurely was banned. Perhaps not telling them everything when they were clearly keeping things secret as well seemed like a good idea. 

The two Ascians exchanged some words so fast that Ryne did not understand what they said other than hearing that it was Amaurotine. Unukalhai bowed and departed, followed by Emet-Selch waving a hand through the air and claiming that he was needed in a Garlean meeting. 

Alone with Elidibus in a strange nation, she suddenly realised just how tired she was. 

Alas, Elidibus did not give her a chance to breathe in and out properly, and merely opened a portal and pushed her inside wordlessly. 

“Hey, wait, what about Emet-Selch—“

She stumbled out of another portal into the very room she had left her body in. The sudden crystalline blue of the Crystal Tower startled her, and Elidibus let out yet another sigh while he waited for her to repossess her Source body. Only when she blinked open her eyes on the ground did he finally sit down on the floor as well and then shook his head several times. 

“How is it that you and that Warrior of Light act so unlike what all mortals displayed previously? Do you have _any_ idea how impossible I considered speaking to Emet-Selch about this like a rational person?”

Ryne stretched a little on the floor and then could not help but grin at him. “Does that mean he will be working with us?” 

Elidibus rubbed his eyes and then dropped his hands from his face. The same exhaustion that all Unsundered seemed to share had never been more apparent on his face, borrowed or not, than right now. “He knows how history proceeds to a certain point now. He will, and I am quoting him directly here, ‘join us from the moment we bust the Scions out and move on to breaking the old man’s back, but not a moment sooner’. Which means he will play his role as Solus zos Galvus to completion.” 

The attack on Castrum Centri that freed the Scions and had Lahabrea reveal himself as the one who pulled the strings in the background, then. That was still a rather long time from now, seeing as they had not even gotten to the point where Meteor had met Cid Garlond and Alphinaud yet. 

Ryne was very excited to meet Cid Garlond. And knowing that her perseverance had once more paid off only made her mood better. She knew she was beaming at the Ascian when she sat up—Meteor and the Exarch would be rather impressed with that, especially since Meteor and Elidibus both had proclaimed Emet-Selch a tough case but not impossible. 

Her excitement seemed to be infectious, considering that eventually even the heavily sighing Elidibus cracked a small smile at her when he got up and offered her a hand. “I have to admit, I did not believe that you would be able to draw out someone as elusive as the Seer.” 

“He did say he thought about approaching me twice before his curiosity got the better of him.” He grumbled something in agreement and once more shoved her through a portal. This time she stumbled down a slope that led to the glittering surface of a lake at night, and she barely managed to stop herself from falling into the water with a rather embarrassing squawk escaping her. “Emissary? Did Emet-Selch send me out on a duty that he believed I would fail?”

“He believed it the most likely outcome, yes, but you need not forget that even before they were Emet-Selch and Gerun, Hades and Hythlodaeus were close enough to know how the other ticked. He counted on Gerun’s curiosity remaining as overwhelming as it used to be in the past, long before the Sundering. And he counted correctly, it appears.”

She could have sworn she had heard the name ‘Hythlodaeus’ before. Not in the context of the Fourteenth, of course—she would have remembered anything about Gerun. But they had found nothing other than confirmations that he blew off both the Convocation and Venat’s faction after Termination and seemingly still refused to take either side. Or even speak about the deities that had decided the flow of history ever since a single sound split the earth beneath Amaurot. 

Perhaps she could ask Meteor the next time they had a moment between the both of them. 

For now, she was acutely aware of how late they were and how exhausted she was. But they needed to get back to Meteor and the Exarch before those two had to face the Lord of the Crags on their own. _That_ would have roused suspicions against her and the Emissary, after all. 


	19. ACT III: Eorzean Puzzle Pieces on an Amaurotine Chess Board, Part 2

The Scions had always sort of dodged the question even after all had been revealed and they were watching the afternoon sun set over the Crystarium. History books rarely made a mention of it—after all, the Warrior of Light was a skilled individual who picked up countless arts all over the realm. Hells, he himself had seen them pick up the basics of many a craft at the Crystarium. A weapon remained a weapon and swinging them was easy enough to learn. Even the brutal basics of magic were more or less easy to understand once someone got behind it, even if the end result of a mediocre at best mage or a mage with the skill to tear a hole in reality was all based on an individual’s innate skill.

The sword that Meteor lugged around was rather strange compared to the pair of weapons that he had gotten to know them with. They had been an axe-slinging warrior back then, though they also carried a bow. Apparently that was what they had started with—unsurprising, given their background as child of humble La Noscean farmers. Following the betrayal of the Crystal Braves and them seeing sanctuary in Ishgard, they very quickly had picked up the lance, an art that they apparently even mastered nearly on the same level as the Azure Dragoon back then. Then after that they had Lyse teach them in the art of brawling and then learned how a Samurai handled their sword from a man called Gosetsu during their stay in Doma.

The question that had always burnt under his tongue was when and why they had picked up a dark knight’s sword and armour. Especially since one of the people they had met during the journey to learn that art had turned out to be loyal until the end, to the point that she hunted down their soul crystal and returned to a city that had scorned her for the sins of her father simply to entrust the crystal to someone. Hells, now that he thought about it that woman called Rielle would merely be a girl soon to be hunted by her own mother at this point.

He had never had the chance to ask about it—it had always sort of left his thoughts whenever Meteor came in through the portal and cheerfully greeted him, exchanged words with him and then set off to do whatever it was they did on the First.

In Holminster Switch they had led the way with a certainty that even surprised Lyna, given that the Exarch and her clearly knew the terrain better than them and the twins. That sword had carved through countless sin eaters that day and their face had been a frozen mask of anger. That very same sword would split the skies above all of Norvrandt, would slay the Lightwardens and deliver death to those who deserved it no matter their allegiance. And while they very obviously went and helped each and every single soul the best way they could even when they did some things that were a little less obvious, such as helping the dwarf Giott with her hunt for one of the Cardinal Virtues with but a fiddly little staff and enough determination to move a mountain—the sword remained the weapon they were almost uncannily in tune with.

The dark arts were something that was exceedingly rare to begin with but it had near died out by the time he had awoken again. The soul crystals had all vanished or fallen where their bearers did and were left there. In the wilderness, in the endless snows, in the arid deserts, across the blighted, dead lands. Knowing that Meteor had been one of the last paragons of that art had already raised some questions back then—it did not fit at first. Then slowly but steadily he learned about all the heartbreak and betrayals they had lived through and suddenly he thought he understood. He thought he had been prepared for whatever way they would look like, but actually seeing them in that split moment that nearly _cost them their life_ on the Source had rattled him in more ways than one. And then, when they had finally arrived on the First, they had embraced that dark anger he had seen them wear like a second skin.

They hadn’t changed, of course, but he felt like there was something lurking beneath that murky cloudy lake that had been the Warrior of Light after the fateful evening in Ul’dah.

Little did he know that the answer he would receive was less than pleasant.

Y’shtola berated Elidibus and Ryne for a good twenty minutes, pounded on good manners and not leaving their companions behind for that long. Elidibus merely nodded tiredly, stating that it had been a genuinely important conversation with an ally—the Exarch raised an eyebrow at that. Had those two truly met the Fourteenth? Had that person even deigned to interact with Elidibus? The way he mentioned it it sounded as if they had truly met someone who would be joining them sooner or later, but as things stood they could not exactly talk about it until they took down Titan together.

When they parted with Y’shtola and arrived where Meteor had faced the Lord of the Crags several times before, Meteor had merely taken their sword and laughed softly.

“This’ll be a walk in the park compared to the first and the last time I ever faced him,” they said—and there was a dark shadow that crossed their face for a moment.

The first time they had returned to the aftermath of the massacre in the Waking Sands.

The last time had been shortly before they had faced the self-proclaimed Warriors of Darkness along with the Scions, a half-botched summoning that had led to an incarnation of the Lord of the Crags that had already risen mad with grief and continued to wreak havoc until they put a stop to it.

Ifrit had almost been a joke between the four of them. What had had the arrow-slinging Meteor half dead when they struck the Lord of the Inferno down, they had all but brutally beaten down. Even the Amalj’aa and the Tempered had been rather confused for a second before they had doubled over to play their role as the exhausted adventurers who had defied all reason.

By all means this should have been a walk through a royal flower patch. 

Ryne and Elidibus were exhausted, yes, but they still narrowly dodged whatever was thrown at them. While he had learned the basics of healing in preparation for his task of seeing the Warrior of Darkness to success on the First, outside of their little mining expedition it had been largely unnecessary with Alphinaud there. The fact that he was not a person dedicated to keeping their teammates up was becoming more and more apparent as they continued weathering the constant stomach-turning shakes and falling rocks as Titan continued his onslaught. He was exhausted from keeping his focus spread between all our of them. There were some more severe cuts that continued bleeding even after repeated attempts at patching them up before Titan came barrelling back down upon them. Ryne had one eye closed from a cut on her forehead that bled rather profusely, Elidibus had somehow managed to get a leg beat up and his tail crushed, leading to severe balance issues that forced him to stay closer to the middle of the surprisingly small platform. Which was less than ideal for a caster of no matter how much skill. Meteor weathered swipe after swipe, their armour dented and cracked and their sword somehow still striking true while the Exarch fumbled about.

This was too different from merely testing his obnoxiously bad magical skill with Urianger and Beq Lugg. Too different from Feo Ul laughing as they hovered above him and then told him how to change the spell’s trajectory a little by yanking the staff a little further up.

He simply missed the damn Primal turning around and towering over him until the moment Titan had already made his move. He faced down a fist that would have crushed him, likely even shattered the crystal parts of his body and killed him due to him not being an Ascended.

Meteor moved like a bolt of lightning, shoved him barely out of the way and tried to block that fist with their sword. The Exarch could only watch in horror as they failed at properly blocking it—while they definitely stopped the momentum, they still wound up half crushed and swept aside. Bones broke and they remained on the ground like a discarded puppet. It was a horrible noise that seemed to even silence the nearby Kobolds for a moment before they all broke into loud cheering. He could only stare in horror.

“Oh no,” whispered Ryne—and a moment later a dark cloud all but rose from where Meteor had crumpled onto the ground.

He backed away in panic when he saw them get up. A wretched sound escaped them as they doubled over—the whorl of dark aether around them made it hard to see, but from the way it sounded they had likely thrown up an unhealthy amount of blood and bile. Their right arm was dangling uselessly at their side and their left carried the entire weight of the sword. They were _dragging_ it over the stone ground, which in turn made an awful noise on top of their horribly rattling breath. 

Ryne stumbled over to drag him to his feet—his body complied, but he could not tear his eyes away from that sight. That utter whorl of darkness, the completely blank eyes, the fact that every rattling breath they breathed also had blood bubble up on their lips. He was rather grateful for the armour because it hid any sorts of open wounds or broken, dislocated bones that had pierced out of their body.

Even Elidibus was watching with narrowed eyes by now, his crushed and broken tail almost painfully comical-looking next to _that._

He couldn’t _see_ what was going on there when the dark cloud flared up once more. He heard another wretched crack, something that was both rattling final breath and a screech that made his blood run cold in his veins that most definitely came out of Meteor’s throat. He swore for a split second he saw another human form beside Meteor as they raised their weapon high with one hand. That darkness that had enveloped them for all of this lashed out like it had its own mind, and the cheering Kobolds turned to screeching in fear and fleeing as Titan suddenly had the fight turned upon him. 

“Exarch… Emissary,” Ryne screamed through the horrible noise, “get ready! We need to patch them up, lest they truly bleed to death!” As she was saying that she had already scattered a good amount of potions and tonics about, all uncapped and ready to be poured.

“What on earth _is that!?”_ He wasn’t even embarrassed by how shrill and panicked his voice was.

“No clue,” came the hurried reply as Titan all but burst into glittering aether under the sheer violent assault of that dark cloud that covered Meteor. “All I know about it is that it fixes immediately life-ending injuries enough for someone else to patch them up, but… well, in three, two, one!”

At one the dark cloud immediately dispersed. Meteor stood right where not a moment before Titan had been. Their sword slipped from their hand with a loud, almost final clatter as they once more collapsed with a groan. Ryne snatched up several potions and what not and immediately bolted forwards, followed by the limping Elidibus who all but discarded his weapon and instead used his hands to weave a spell or two. The Exarch couldn’t move.

There were two pools of blood, one where they had fallen after taking the blow meant for him and the other one right underneath them now. Elidibus and Ryne were discussing something or other about the healing arts back in Amaurot, with the Ascian sounding both exhausted and defensive about his apparent lack of skill with it. He just couldn’t tear his eyes away from all the blood.

Finally, _finally_ he understood why the Scions refused to talk about what precisely was going on. They must have picked the dark arts up at some point after Ul’dah and their arrival on the First, might have perhaps even used it more than from the moment they awoke again after nearly dying defending Ala Mhigo from Elidibus and Garlemald.

He shoved himself to his feet and exhaled a shaky breath. He collected more bottles for Ryne and slowly brought them on over. How Krile had managed to learn the art of conjury without going insane considering her empathy was beyond him as he slowly handed Ryne a flask, put the others next to her and then dropped down next to Elidibus and focused on his weapon.

Quietly he closed his eyes and instead tried to pour what energy he had left into mending all those bleeding cuts.

* * *

“We’ll rest once we’ve returned to the Waking Sands,” was all Meteor said to the people who almost wanted to insist on them staying at Camp Bronze Lake for a while to take care of them.

They were lagging behind on that last leg from Horizon to Vesper Bay, intensely focused on putting one foot before the other. Even after more skilled healers had taken care of mending the more severely broken bones, they seemed strangely drained.

Once the roads were clear of any passing Chocobos and only the dread of what waited for them ahead, Elidibus turned around and walked backwards for a while. He had his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed as he watched Meteor for a while.

“I see,” he said quietly and then shook his head. “Finally, another piece to the puzzle that Emet-Selch’s most untimely demise left for me.”

The Exarch almost let out an annoyed snarl at that. Meteor had raised their head a little and winced because of Elidibus. “Are you going to share your observation with the rest of the class, Emissary, or are you content being an obnoxious bastard?” Harsh, perhaps, but he needed to let that out.

Elidibus shrugged it off. “Long had I wondered what tempted him to hand our legacy to you of all people. You are delightfully bland for a mortal—and that precisely was the only hint I _should_ have needed, for it appears that delightful blandness is inherent to the soul, no matter how many times sundered.”

“If that is an insult, I’m afraid I don’t get it,” Meteor slurred a little and shrugged vaguely.

The Ascian merely sighed and shook his head. “Hydaelyn’s choices are amusing if nothing else, despite the fact that she only chose you for saviour once the need arose and you gaining the Echo happened before that. But perhaps _some_ elaboration will help, even if it will not jog your memory, Alexis of Anamnesis Anyder.”

A long pause. Ryne clearly was thinking and coming up with nothing, just as Meteor’s exhaustion was replaced with exasperation for a moment.

Elidibus waved a hand through the air with yet another sigh. “A librarian, O Chosen of Hydaelyn. You are a librarian given a weapon and told to fight for the good of the world. A librarian who, mind, happened to be good friends with Emet-Selch and Gerun both. A librarian who turned to darker arts following the summoning of Zodiark. It is rather clear that the penchant for the darker arts still runs through your soul even now. Of course Emet-Selch would notice that eventually—and would deny it otherwise, seeing as you Sundered are incomplete. But seeing that he was defeated, of course he would hand his legacy to what remained of his friend.”

Meteor said nothing and continued dragging themself along the road to Vesper Bay.

* * *

For a supposed “slump” in the story, it was exceedingly hard to catch Meteor on their own to apologise to them properly. But from the moment they found the Waking Sands dead and moving to the Church of Saint Adama Landama in Eastern Thanalan, it seemed as if Meteor either was always with someone else or gone completely. Cid Garlond, or as he was called right now, Marques, proved to be a jittery but kind-hearted person who very likely saw all four them as people in desperate need of a distraction. His nervous smile also hid the fact that he struggled quite a bit with how his skills did not precisely align with what he considered a good person—it was bizarre, having gotten to know Cid once his memories had returned and he had fully embraced his skills as a tool for good.

The Exarch told him as much when Marques confessed that and was immediately asked how he would know.

“The skill doesn’t matter. What matters is how you use it. Thaumaturges have a close link to the void—does that make all thaumaturges inherently bad people? Of course not. Having a knack for tinkering with machinery does not make one bad simply because the Garleans are who do that normally. And I most sincerely doubt that you would use your skills for ill, Marques.”

At the very least it earned him a confused but grateful smile.

It wasn’t until the torrential rain came up again after a day of humid heat making breathing incredibly hard that he got a chance to talk to Meteor. When the rain started everyone else had been present, exhausted after the previous day’s happenings. The only one who had appeared to remain unimpressed and nearly stoically detached from the Scions was Elidibus—hauling those corpses to the carriage and returning to Little Solace and hear these Sylphs cry out and swear vengeance upon the Garleans should the time ever come had been just as heart-wrenching as waking up in a world on the brink had been. Thus Father Iluid had almost gently told them to take it slow today, what with the rain on the horizon and the other day’s happenings. That man may as well have been a saint himself, seeing as Elidibus stalked off wordlessly and started slinging spells at clouds of insects.

“We all grieve differently, and it would seem that your friend Emissary deals with it by working himself to the bone.”

Not incorrect, though Elidibus was hardly grieving for the Scions. He was grieving for a world that no longer existed.

But once the rain started, he realised that Meteor had left to gather something a while ago and remained missing still. Thus, with little explanation other than that he was going to look for them, he started sprinting through the heavy rain.

He had joined the people of the Crystarium the first time it had truly rained. There were a handful Viera and Elezen who had been children before the Flood, but a staggering majority had never seen a thunderstorm, let alone a pleasant spring shower like that. The children had all been laughing and dancing around, others huddled under cover and marvelled at how the clouds looked. The Exarch himself had been joined by Lyna who had delivered a report, and even the normally stoic and collected Lyna had let out a delighted laugh at that.

This downpour was heavy and dreary just as the rain had been that fateful night that Vauthry had decided that the people of Lakeland and the Crystarium would pay for the crime of supporting the return of the night. He fell into a jog and continued scanning the area—Meteor could not have gotten all too far considering they were still rather unsteady on their legs and their Chocobo was an exceptionally smart creature that knew how far was too far.

Indeed, it was a delighted chirp that gave away the fact that they were huddled in a ruin on the way to the Golden Bazaar and a flash of bright yellow feathers that helped him locate them. Meteor laughed quietly when the Chocobo indeed made its joy known and nearly barrelled the Exarch over.

“Alphinaud should be arriving tomorrow,” they eventually said as the rain grew heavier.

“Are you… are you truly well enough to be travelling to Coerthas?”

“Your concern is touching, Raha, but I’ve pulled through worse. I was more of a mess the last time I had to give myself to the Living Dead like that.”

He clenched his fists. This ruin had a half-intact roof still, but there was water pooling around the debris that had once been the rest of the roof. Meteor’s Chocobo had lain down by this point and curled up, fully knowing that their owner was not about to travel back in the rain like this. Meteor and he were both leaning against the still standing wall side by side. Not exactly the place he had imagined to be in to apologise to them for putting them through this, but it would serve as long as no one else was around.

“That doesn’t mean you should have to pull through it in the first place,” he muttered and then shook his head. “You paid for _my_ mistake. I knew better than that, and yet, I… I failed _you_ and _you_ were the one who got hurt in the process. I am… so sorry.”

They shifted slightly, leaning their weight onto the leg that had not been horrendously broken by the time the unlikely group had managed to get them stable enough to drag them back to Camp Bronze Lake. “Raha, it’s fine.”

“No, it very much is not!” He drew his ears backwards and stared at his feet. Goodness, he was so ashamed of himself yet for all the eloquence he had taught himself over the years as the Crystal Exarch, his words failed him now that he needed them most. “We are supposed to work together, not have you cover my own failings. If we are to succeed, then everyone needs to pull their weight—which I am evidently not. And that lack of weight-pulling is what put you through this… mess.”

He half expected them to either agree or to get mad at him. Nothing of the sort happened—they instead put one hand onto his head and pat him gently. “Your strength isn’t your combat prowess, Raha. It has never been. We all know that and we absolutely can work around it. Your strength more lies in your almost boundless determination to win a fight. Make no mistake, that is just as important as the strength to pull through. But you’ve been stubborn from the very day we met, and your stubborn determination to win made you anything but dead weight in the World of Darkness.”

Part of him wanted to interject that the voidsent there had ignored him because of his bloodline’s pact with the Cloud of Darkness. What he settled for instead was a very quiet “Perhaps so, but I could have very much cost you your life then and there, and for that I do apologise”.

He averted his gaze. Even back in Kholusia they had taken blows that had been meant for him while he, weakened by the distance to the Crystal Tower, tried to patch up their wounds. A surge of defiant determination to see this story to its supposed end had made him break his limits and had healed them from the brink to fighting fit. But right now all he had was the distant dizziness from being too far from the Tower for too long.

Meteor pushed themself off the wall they were leaning against and walked over to stand perfectly opposite him. They put their hands on his shoulders.

“Had I not intervened, what then? I am Ascended, a Higher Ascian for all intents and purposes. I can repossess a body should the need arise. You, however, cannot. That blow sent me to the seven hells and I came back screaming—it would have killed you and that would have been it. If you believe that me getting whacked around like that is the worst possible case… well, you would be wrong.”

The Exarch stared at them kind of dumbfounded for a moment, his ears plastered against his head as he tried to think of a comeback to that. They were correct and he knew it, of course. He would have died and that would have been the end of that. They would have gotten away uninjured, of course.

The rain was slowly getting less torrential if the sound was anything to go by.

“But—“

“Dammit, Raha, don’t you dare say that you dying would have been preferable to me reaching into the dark to pull myself from the brink.”

He shook his head furiously. “No. I swore that my death would only be the extremest of measures, and it remains such. But I should also not let my momentary carelessness endanger you or anyone else. And for that very carelessness I do apologise—doubly so because you were driven to such… extreme measures because of me.”

They shrugged vaguely and cracked a smile at him.

“Forgiven and forgotten, Raha.”

* * *

The Alphinaud he had gotten to know was an almost shockingly humble if idealistic mage who focused on his teammates in combat.

The Alphinaud who all but strutted into the Church of Saint Adama Landama was a very far cry from that. It would have been amusing had the group currently in the church not been the very people he had been looking for. At the very least it meant that Cid would be on his way to recover his memories from this point out—but the Exarch noticed how Elidibus narrowed his eyes a little.

Something was up.

And the Emissary and Ryne had not told them what precisely they had been up to yet, either.


	20. INTERLUDE IV: Of Dark Arts

“Why do we call weapon creation ‘dark arts’ anyway?”

He flicked another stash of documents into a trash can and then moved towards the bookshelf. It was so much easier to move about without the communal robes, but sometimes he missed wearing them for the dramatic effect.

“Weapons with a mind of their own are ill-advised. You cannot create a creature without base instinct, for it breaks the fundamentals of that school of creation. Weapons, on the other hand, need no mind. They merely are given the duty to destroy—and you know as well as I do that this sort of thing is heavily frowned upon.”

For a visitor to his office, they most certainly had managed to take over his desk while he did the cursory cleaning duties he did every other decade. Too many documents of submitted and not passed concepts, revisions that were also failed, all stuffed into the various bookshelves in his room or left ignored on whatever surface he found.

Alexis sighed and waved the document they had been looking at around. “What makes this guy’s submission of a weapon that creates smaller weapons to ensure proper defence so different from the so-called masterpieces that haunt the Professor’s halls at the Words of Lahabrea?”

Hythlodaeus paused while trying to reach for a stack of documents on top of the bookshelf he had been working on. The submitter had angrily asked the same thing when his concept had not even passed the preliminary inspection and it had taken the joint effort of him and Emet-Selch to make him understand what precisely made these things different. Alexis was a librarian at Anamnesis Anyder who spent most of their time cataloguing concepts that had gone through the inspection processes here and were permitted to be left for public access.

“First off, Lahabrea’s creations are not accessible to the public. He oftentimes even destroys the very matrix he conjures his latest creation from merely to prevent it becoming an issue should his office get broken into.”

“Well, yeah. We could do the same to that weapon creating more weapons.”

He sighed and hopped slightly to finally get the stack of papers. Documents rained down upon him, fluttering to the ground below him like the cloud of prismatic butterflies a child had conjured up in the streets the other day. All those rejected concepts landed on the ground and he snorted before bending over to gather them up in his arms. “Of course we could. But the creations in the Words of Lahabrea are under constant observation by either their creator or his closer circle of assistants. While you may encounter a lumbering suit of armour like those the people from his father’s homeland wear, it is never on its own. Did you ever notice that?”

“Now that you mention it… they indeed are never on their own.”

“Can you ensure the same for a living weapon to be employed for private property or concerns?”

“No…?”

“And there you have it. Of course it did not stop people from attempting it regardless—and as things go in these events, the creation matrices go missing and another weapon capable of summoning more of its kind spawns soon thereafter, and the cycle repeats. The very reason it is outlawed in Amaurot to create living weapons unless the ruling bureaus of public safety, international relations, architecture, national structure as well as the current heads of the sub-bureaus of phantomology, sorcery, astrology and geomancy grant you permission to is that rampant living weapons near tore part of the continent to shreds before Amaurot’s foundation was laid by the first Convocation of Fourteen.” He stood back up straight and unceremoniously dumped the documents into the can and the slid over to the next bookshelf. “So, even had we here at the Bureau of the Architect had given this creation a green light, it would have had to go through the hands of not only Emet-Selch herself, but also the hands of Loghrif, Deudalaphon and Elidibus via their bureaus. That of course is excluding our dear Professor since he is the current head of all phantomologists as well Lahabrea of the Convocation, Sorcerer Oknos and his scrutiny, Astrologian Mira and Geomancer Enochlesis and their combined judgement.”

Alexis let out a soft groan and all but collapsed onto his desk. Hythlodaeus raised an eyebrow at them when they bonked their head against the desk. “And here I thought learning the entire catalogue of creations at Anamnesis was insane. How do you even retain all that information?” 

“Ah, well, I had quite a lot of time to learn it. And believe it or not, living weapons are brought up quite more often than the other cases. And if it answers your question, it is usually called a ‘dark art’ because of its intent to harm other living beings. No one but a twisted person would fall back to that sort of creation.”

That was a lie. But Alexis shrugged and sat back up at that and asked if he needed help with his obsolete document collection. 

There was more nuance to living weapons and the dark arts but it had almost exclusively been used by people who had wound up doing terrible things outside of the self-defence that most of these weapons were made for. Thus rather than judging them from a case-to-case scenario, the first Convocation had set up a convoluted process to nip any desires in the bud and merely let the phantomologists do as they pleased for the sake of research. 

* * *

“Chief.”

Something about the hallways on this day were surprisingly ominous. Not that the Words of Lahabrea did not already carry an air of unease, seeing as they were the prowling grounds of masterpieces that were only overshadowed by naturally occurring monstrosities that prowled in the wildernesses of both continents. 

It didn’t help that the Professor had a surprisingly soft voice for someone of his heritage. Normally everyone with even the slightest bit of flame-aligned blood within them was a loud, almost boisterous and lively person. The only time the Professor sounded like that was during his lectures—or when he ran on one hour of sleep in the past 30 days. The fact that he could out-debate everything and anything under the sun had earned him the seat of Lahabrea an age and a half ago, but the reason why the Words of Lahabrea had been filled with one masterpiece chasing another masterpiece was because he also just so happened to be a phantomologist of unparalleled proportions. 

“Speaker?”

The cowl and the mask made it rather hard to discern his expression. 

“You have delivered the former Emet-Selch’s documents to the Words of Mitron, have you not?”

“That I have indeed.”

“If I may be so forward,” Lahabrea said and there was a strange edge to his soft voice that all but told Hythlodaeus that his eyes were required, “there has been an… incident. We have not quite confirmed what precisely went on and would require an outsider’s opinion on what happened and how to proceed.”

He shrugged vaguely and followed Lahabrea down the halls. He had a fair idea what was going on as he followed—a masterpiece, a stray soul, the wrong moment of creation. It was rare but it happened—and subpar aethersight made it hard to perceive what precisely had gone wrong with a creation. Sometimes they merely acted strangely when a stray thought messed with the process, but a soul was a dire call. 

A fretting higher-up of the Words of Lahabrea awaited them beside a door, and the fact that their aether was dimmer than usual meant it was their creation behind those doors. He noted their singed robes with a concerned pat on their shoulder. Lahabrea wasted no time in throwing open the doors, and Hythlodaeus winced slightly when a horrendous shriek immediately assaulted his ears. 

He had always enjoyed the more elaborate avian creations. While many a self-proclaimed psychologist could make some ridiculous link to the fact he “flew the nest” early, Hythlodaeus knew that he merely liked their aesthetics. There was a certain grace to avian creations that others lacked and that plants could never hope to recreate. To say that the avian creation inside that room was breathtaking would have been an understatement. It was clear that one had been created to be outrageously gorgeous on top of whatever else its purpose was. 

Without even waiting for a question, Lahabrea immediately began listing its purpose, complete with every number attached to the individually approved concept ideas and even giving him the precise document number on that bird in particular. Hells, he even had the name of the worker who had stamped the document of the concept as accepted. 

Hythlodaeus nodded, tracking the bird as it continued screeching and tracing arcs of fire through the air. 

“The ‘Phoenix’ concept,” he cut Lahabrea off when the Professor even tried to list dates individually. He knew its purpose.

He also knew what was wrong with it. His first assumption that it had been created just as a wayward soul that resisted the pull of the Underworld had passed had been correct. No matter how arguably “alive” any creation in the Words of Lahabrea was, they all lacked souls. They were sterile and empty other than the aether that made them up, a thoroughly pleasing thing to look at for Hythlodaeus. This bird, however, was filled with an ill-coloured glint that spoke of rage and regret, of unfulfilled promises and plain hatred for the living and being alive. 

It knocked itself into the ceiling repeatedly, the shrill cries tearing through the air while the aether around it rippled under its innate healing capabilities working to restore broken bones and broken tissue. 

They backed out of the room when the bird turned its ire upon them after recovering fully, with Lahabrea immediately placing a seal that only another Amaurotine could undo on the door. The bird’s creator still fretted beside them awkwardly, as if they could have known there was a soul right there when they created this bird. 

Hythlodaeus tilted his head from side to side and then let out a long sigh. “I am rather afraid to confirm it is the worst case.” 

Lahabrea cursed softly under his breath before shaking his head. “We are phantomologists. Could we ask you to take care of this, sorcerer?” 

He put a hand on his cheek and closed his eyes. It was mere formality, of course, but right now he had some colourful words bubbling up in his head that were all directed at his parents for trying to make him a _normal_ member of society rather than letting him learn how to control his innate gift. By now it was too late and he was stuck with an explosive burst of aether every time he attempted to strike the connection to the Underworld he had—which Lahabrea knew, of course. Simple formality—he hated it. “This masterpiece is above my skill level. I will have to retrieve proper documentation on your creation to see what might have enticed a stray soul to get close; I will seek a sorcerer capable of enforcing the pull of the Underworld on this poor thing. Will the seal hold that long, Speaker?” 

“It will.”

They nodded at each other, and Hythlodaeus turned around immediately. There was only one person who could take care of something that would regenerate any damage inflicted upon it. He had meant to pester Hades about not having told Alexis about his recent promotion anyway and he had made certain he knew where Hades was before entering Akademia Anyder. A simple job to the Bureau of the Architect, then a short departure from the way to collect the new Emet-Selch, and then returning here to take care of the creation itself and then the paperwork. 

He hadn’t exactly wanted to spend his evening that way, but there was no way around it. 

* * *

Oh, he knew precisely whenever something was a set-up. This all but _screamed_ “come look at me!” and there were only three people who knew that he would see that and have the urge to investigate it. A sorcerer, a phantomologist and a geomancer all would see that her soul was an interesting patchwork as if someone had flattened out a Source soul and stitched it onto a Shard soul. 

He technically was a sorcerer like Emet-Selch, which meant that he dealt mostly in matters involving incorporeal aether. The soul, the Underworld, the Lifestream, whatever one would call it—he had always drawn his powers from there when his own proved insufficient. 

Just as Lahabrea always seemed to borrow it from living beings around him, as phantomologists were wont to be—he weaponised that skill after the Sundering when he had always made certain to drain engendered creations before turning his hunger for aether during creation onto anything else. Elidibus meanwhile, as most geomancers did, drew his aether from the surrounding land. 

He was not a fool about to stumble into this bold trap they had left for him, however. He had watched Elidibus and Emet-Selch’s aether in the distance flare as if they were engrossed in an important discussion. Besides, he could see the particulars of her soul just fine from where he was barely outside her limited, sundered vision. 

Hydaelyn’s light was bright and festered on top of a soul that already had a colour best described as iridescent. He had known her before the Sundering, and it was upsetting just how thin her soul had been spread. 

The most interesting part about it now was its strange look. Someone had very lovingly and carefully sown a Source soul onto that girl’s—ironically enough, the same soul. Other attempts at doing that had all failed because the souls had not matched. He had watched how desperate Igeyorhm had been to find a solution how to salvage the supposedly lost souls of the Thirteenth, but her attempts had all failed because she had tried to sew completely different souls together, leading to horrendous deaths at her hands on the Source and her giving up after enough atrocities. But this one was a perfect match, it had once been whole and someone had tried to make it whole again to a certain degree. 

What was the most interesting however was that the light used to bind it together was not the light associated with Hydaelyn. Someone had used an immense outside source of light, perfect stagnation, and used it as the thread to bind the parts together. It was a fine, barely noticeable difference between that binding light and the light of the Mothercrystal. 

Half of him was reeling at this mangled nonsense. The other half was utterly intrigued by how something like this had even been possible. 

He had approached a familiar glint of blue that had light woven through it. While he had wasted a good amount of mortal time in Garlemald, hemming and hawing back and forth between the imperial palace and the empty, snowy backstreets, sometimes he followed the wind and wound up in different places all over this sundered world. And that evening just so happened to have had that blue spark he remembered brimming with morbid amusement as he shook off those that would continue on to summon Hydaelyn who tried to follow him and make him join their endeavour. The same blue glint that had always belonged to Alexis even as they roused a veritable army of living weapons because their talent for just about anything had been shattered by living through the end of the world and they instead turned to defending themself against the world as a whole. 

Something about them and their companion that evening had been more than a tad strange, but he had started piecing the puzzle together slowly but steadily. Despite his previous aversion to him, playing the card of Gerun worked a surprising amount on young Unukalhai, and hesitantly he explained what was going on while he filled in some holes that Elidibus had very likely deliberately left in the information given to that child. 

Part of him had so very desperately wanted to laugh. Mortals, for all their supposed incomplete state, had managed what Amaurot had still merely dreamt about in its wildest dreams—time travel. The other part of him had refused that claim violently. He had settled for a blank nod and asked Unukalhai to continue. 

While it was clear the boy was left out of hundreds of loops thanks to Ophion, Hythlodaeus had been able to start piecing the puzzle together after someone had scattered the pieces on Ophion’s chessboard. That girl came from a future he had tried to warn Emet-Selch of, which in turn of course would mean that the idiot would run ahead and start his war of succession only to be roused by Elidibus sometime after Lahabrea’s passing and then getting _crushed_ by the Warrior of Light. 

Somewhere down the line Hydaelyn and Zodiark had been roused and crushed the creation by warring over it despite being tasked to protect it. After all the other was an alien element, a danger that needed to be destroyed no matter what. 

It was so utterly laughable that he let out what Alexis and Hades usually called his “bitter hyena cackle”. Usually he let it out whenever his dear parents were involved—and that was the only point where he was in full agreement with himself; they deserved only that bitter laughter. 

“A trap you may be, Little Miss Time Traveller,” he said to himself and noted that at sunrise, Varis yae Galvus marched alongside his legion, “but perhaps it is time I _acted.”_


	21. ACT III: Eorzean Puzzle Pieces on an Amaurotine Chess Board, Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternative chapter title: Why Are You Two Like This
> 
> i've had a lot of spare time waiting for arr sightseeing logs over the past few days so i spent a lot of it writing, sorry,  
> (plus side, caught my wol as odin out in the wild)

How precisely they had gotten stuck with _Elidibus_ was a tad beyond them, but there were worse things, they presumed. After all they would eventually have to work with Ilberd and his ilk as if they weren’t going to literally sell them to Teledji Adeledji and Lolorito down the line. If nothing else, Elidibus was surprisingly helpful at harvesting ice sprite cores for Cid, lessening the workload and the literal biting cold significantly compared to them taking potshots at them with chattering teeth and clammy fingers that had trouble shooting efficiently with their stiff bow. 

Besides, it gave them a good view of how he worked his magic—and as it turned out, it looked more like a thaumaturge and conjurer mix than a proper Red Mage. Proper Red Mages, as Alisaie had so diligently explained to them, merely borrowed their own aether. After all the War of the Magi had bled the land so dry that it had flooded in response, and the survivors of Amdapor and Mhach worked together to prevent their tragedy from occurring again while yet relying on magic to do their thing. A conduit of some sort to intensify that innate aether, a basic understanding of both thaumaturgy and conjury, and a desire to keep the odds even.

They had messed a little with thaumaturgy which did drain just about anything around it including its caster to align energies to the astral and the umbral. The Exarch had taught them the basics of conjury, how there was a hard limit on what a healer could borrow from their surroundings and their surroundings only—tapping into their own aether to heal was liable to kill the conjurer in no time flat even if they would be more efficient before they were spent.

Elidibus did drain the surrounding aether a little; it was hard to see but there were definitive dips in the snow blanket where he cast his spells. What was strange about that was the fact that he was seemingly not exhausting himself in the process like most thaumaturges would have after a while of casting spells. Instead he continued slinging astral charge after astral charge despite the aether he used from his surroundings clearly being umbral. It was bizarre, to say the least.

Now that their thought were not swimming in a heavy blanket of mist and their ears weren’t filled with a droning that very clearly were those parts of them that they named Fray, Myste and Ardbert telling them to slow the hell down or letting them take over, they had been thinking about Elidibus’ almost cheerful accusation of them having used the ‘dark arts’ before.

Knowing what little they did of Amaurot it likely was a far, _far_ cry from what they did nowadays, but the coincidence was mildly frightening to say the least. As if the sundered souls they all bore still tried to return to what they had done before the Sundering.

“You look as if you have a question burning on your mind,” Elidibus eventually said without turning around and instead sniping an ice sprite and a dragonfly at the same time. The little dragon fell with nary a sound while the sprite shattered into pieces with the core remaining intact. He almost nonchalantly wandered over, kicked the dead dragonfly out of his path and then picked the core up gingerly. The little bag Cid had given them to hold these cores was clinking with the sheer amount of cores that Elidibus had collected in half the time that it had taken them to get the bare minimum.

“Several, actually,” they said hurriedly—after all, Elidibus and Ryne had still not told them what had kept them from being on time, but the dark arts comment was more recent.

Elidibus shrugged vaguely. “You have enough time to ask one of them ere we are to return to Garlond.”

“Shit. I-I mean.” There was a reason why the Scions usually did the speaking for them. Even back with NOAH eventually G’raha had cheerfully been the one to speak while they were perfectly content listening in on the conversation. “Uh. Souls. I’ve got a question about souls. Do we… Sundered… do we repeat what we did before we were sundered?”

The Ascian paused for a moment while marching over to another core in the snow. He plucked it off the ground and then merely held it up into the afternoon sun that could be brighter than the end of the world and still would not warm the earth in a post-Calamity Coerthas. It glittered as sprite cores were wont to do, the icy blue reminiscent of when Ryne had overestimated her control over light and nearly frozen them to death had it not been for Gaia’s timely intervention. The same icy blue that had followed Ysayle wherever she went, and their heart constricted violently at that thought. That woman who only ever had the good of her people and the dragons at heart, twisted though her actions had been, would be alive and would soon be approached by Nabriales in the aftermath of Lahabrea’s defeat.

“In a sense, you indeed do.”

“Huh?”

He shoved the core into the bag and turned around to target the next ice sprite. “Of course you would never succeed in repeating what the Unsundered soul did—you will always remain fundamentally broken. But an unhealthy obsession with weapons to fill a void lingers no matter what. The student determined to prove herself better than her master will overshoot the target. You tread familiar waters, each and every single one of you sundered. Some try to leave the waters and fail. Others succeed and learn quickly that it is not within their might. Of course someone with an interest in what we called dark arts will voice an interest in what mortals call dark arts—it is the interest that unites Sundered and Unsundered soul.”

They blinked as another three ice sprites shattered. Elidibus sighed.

“What was that mortal concept again… soulmates. Predestined lovers. Expand that concept to what you excel at as well as personal relationships, and you have your answer. It is in fact your shattered, mangled, mishandled souls attempting to recreate what you once had in life. Platonic or romantic, you Sundered are drawn to the people your souls still remember.”

“And you Unsundered? Are you drawn to Sundered that you once knew?”

“Do not be ridiculous. Momentary weakness through exhaustion and the fact you had punched a hole into him made Emet-Selch soft enough to entrust our legacy to I presume what he saw as the closest thing to a once close friend that he would get in those final moments.”

They almost wanted to comment on the fact that Emet-Selch’s recreation of Amaurot had been home to at least one shade that he had once considered close. If that shades original self had survived the Final Days and had not been a sacrifice to Zodiark there was no doubt that he had been sundered by Hydaelyn. But outside of that one sighting and an off-hand comment about how they had obtained the permit to enter the building where Emet-Selch likely lurked they had never mentioned the shade called Hythlodaeus again and the one time they returned to the slowly fading shade of Amaurot they had not come across that shade in particular.

“Some Ascended do indulge in finding the people they now remember thanks to their ascension, but it is neither encouraged nor discouraged to do so. All they will find is disappointment and a stark reminder that the world is broken and we have been given the duty to restore it to its former glory.”

He turned around, the cores in the bag clinking against one another. It was a soft, jingling sound that was often heard in snowstorms whenever these sprites cropped up en masse—Meteor felt their entire body go slightly numb at that thought.

Elidibus returned to Whitebrim Front unbothered, only returning to a careful stumbling limp once other people saw him—after all he was supposed to be a Miqo’te with the excruciatingly painful injury of a tail that had been broken at two points.

They shook their head.

The more they learned the less they understood about the Emissary.

* * *

“Pray, permit the curiosity. Meteor, was it?”

They blinked an eye open to look at Alphinaud. They had witnessed how his ego had evolved and then caved in on him, leading to him reforming himself to a better person. Estinien had seen his late younger brother in Alphinaud, Ysayle had seen a sibling she had never had in him, and Meteor had simply dealt with him in the same way their oldest sister ha dealt with them. This young man was a far cry from the Elezen who had worked together with the impoverished people outside of Gatetown, who had taken care of fields and created connections between people on the brink of losing their last remaining sliver of hope—but he was still Alphinaud no matter what developments he had yet to make.

“Aye,” they said and stretched with a yawn.

The good thing about not being a single adventurer was that the others could take care of some of the more menial tasks, something they often mentioned with a wide grin on their face whenever no one else was listening. After all they had already gone through all of this nonsense and they knew the solution to the issue, but seeing a historian, a manipulator and a girl raised on second-hand retellings of these tales was more than hilarious. At the very least they were on their way to fetch the proper crystal this time around, meaning that the encounter with Garuda and the reveal of Gaius and the Ultima Weapon was coming inexorably closer.

“It is rather interesting that all four of you have chosen some sorts of nicknames to keep your true identities concealed,” Alphinaud said. “Is there a particular reason for ‘Meteor’?”

It had been Cid who had asked that when they had returned with the proper crystal in a vessel. Interesting that the details were blurring and changing ever so slightly, but they saw how Cid perked up from the Enterprise to listen.

“When I was a kid, I called Dalamud a meteor on accident. Came back to me when I stared at it coming down during the Calamity, and when I left home to become an adventurer I went with it.”

“Interesting.”

That much was at least not a lie—that was why they had chosen Meteor as a name rather than their fairly plain name they had been given by their parents.

“And the other three? Oracle, Exarch, Emissary…?”

They shrugged vaguely and met Alphinaud’s rather inquisitive eyes. Goodness, they always knew that he could be ferocious when he wanted information out of people but they had never truly suffered under his scrutiny.

“Exarch and Emissary called each other that when they were kids. When they left their home, they just decided to go by that. Oracle was called that when her Echo awoke and she correctly guessed who had stolen something when the Echo showed her that by sheer chance.”

“I see, I see.” Something told them that Alphinaud was not done asking quite yet. And certainly enough, after he drummed his fingers against his tome he narrowed his eyes. “Emissary and Oracle were talking about an architect and a speaker. Am I correct to assume that they are also cover names for adventurers?”

They scratched their face a little. If they had truly wanted to pretend they were the same, they would have shaved a long time ago. For now the adventurer who had been too busy to shave properly was the best look for them, however.

Cid was now very obviously listening to the conversation, and Meteor shifted a little.

“You would be correct with that assumption, yeah. Architect and Speaker are numbers five and six of our seven adventurers band. We all just went off doing our own things and said we’d reunite once our businesses were concluded.”

That was the lie they had come up with. Seven people, but they had split and scattered to take care of things that concerned them. While Meteor and Exarch had wound up in the Black Shroud together and met Yda and Papalymo there, Emissary and Oracle had done their own thing in La Noscea and met Y’shtola—and the last three members of their merry band, Architect, Speaker, and Seer had all gone off and were yet to return. The people at the Waking Sands had accepted that without too much reading into it; Arenvald in particular once he warmed up to the other adventurers had merely excitedly said that he was very much looking forward to meeting those three.

Alphinaud on the other hand was not going to accept that this easily. Indeed, after a moment of thinking about it he looked them right in the eyes once again. “Are you still in contact? Would they be willing to abandon their duties to help us find and free the missing Scions?”

Meteor scratched the side of their head with an awkward laugh. At the very gruesome aftermath of Titan gave them an explanation as to why the mysterious other three had not arrived to support their fellows yet. “We already sort of… were content working apart and not having contact unless something dire came up. The linkshell was busted when the Lord of Crags sort of nearly killed me.”

Someone cleared their throat behind them, and a trio of grime-covered adventurers arrived at the airship landing. Ryne was carrying the reinforced pot that held the corrupt crystal that Cid needed, which she all but bounced over to hand to the engineer. The Exarch had his ears drawn back and excused himself, claiming that he really needed a bell in an inn room after this mess.

Elidibus stood there like an indignant retainer, hands curled to fists and pushing against his hips. He was flicking his ears back and forth rapidly, clearly trying to keep the illusion of caring about his still not entirely healed tail up.

“Architect will be joining us sooner rather than later. While we were otherwise engaged during the pointless fetch rally the Company of Heroes sent you and Exarch on, Oracle and I met with him.”

Even the Exarch stopped his slow retreat to the flight counter to turn around and stare at Elidibus at that.

“He still has unfinished business but once that is taken care of he will make his way to the Waking Sands. Lucky for us, I have been keeping in contact with him via a rather dedicated to its tasks postmoogle, so even should we not return to the Waking Sands or stay there for long, he will be perfectly capable of catching up with us.”

Ryne jumped back onto the boardwalk and nodded. She looked like she was about to say something, but Elidibus shook his head and spoke in her stead.

“He might know where the other two are, and if not then we will most certainly eventually come across them.”

Meteor threw an annoyed glance at the Exarch, who rolled his eyes back at them and then left for his inn room.

That was the mystery of what Elidibus and Ryne had been keeping to themselves solved.

* * *

Garuda, comparatively, was a walk in the park. There were no incidents other than Elidibus quite literally jumping on top of a stone pillar to turn the winds against Garuda for a moment in what may as well have been an impressive Veraero were he truly a Red Mage and not an Ascian posing as one. The immediate aftermath continued the same as it had ever been, and even their arrival in Mor Dhona was the same. Accompanied by the very excited Biggs and Wedge it was a ridiculous little group that arrived at Revenant’s Toll that afternoon.

The Exarch stared at the Crystal Tower in the distance with his face blank—he had mentioned that he had arrived in Mor Dhona by around that time to start his preliminary investigation of the Crystal Tower and its sudden reappearance back when he had still been a member of NOAH. He had even joked about having just barely missed them and Cid because his attention had been so intensely focused on the object that many history books mentioned but no one had seen since the days of Allag.

Had it not been for Elidibus deliberately nipping any incidents in the bud, perhaps the actual past G’raha Tia would have been bouncing a leg at the Seventh Heaven while stirring a fairly stale pint of ale idly while reading over a report he had penned out in the wild, perched atop a crystallised rock. All there was now was the bustle of adventurers and settlers who were hired to rebuild the place over the next few years, unaware that rather soon they would be joined by refugees from Doma.

It wasn’t until they left the place to talk strategy that Cid suddenly stopped and stared.

They stopped looking at Ryne whom they had been talking to excitedly and looked at whatever had caught Cid’s attention.

At the very least he had had the good grace of not appearing before them as a younger Solus zos Galvus, they reckoned as they pinched the bridge of their nose. Infuriatingly enough he was more than ready to cause trouble, however.

A Garlean with white, short hair that curled into his face was leaning against the aetherite that Rowena’s House of Splendors had built in Revenant’s Toll. He was idly twirling a firearm that Meteor recognised as the very one an alternate version of him had used to shoot the Exarch in the back, then cracked a grin at the group that was staring at him.

“There you are! My, I had almost believed I had missed you,” he said cheerfully and jammed his firearm into a holster. At the very least he carried them obviously now.

Cid and the Exarch both bristled, though the Exarch’s bristle was a lot more subtle.

“And you would be?” Cid’s voice carried his suspicion very obviously, and Emet-Selch broke into a disgustingly playful pout.

“And here I believed that your new friends would have been informed of my coming.” He shrugged—thank goodness he had had the sense of dressing like an adventurer uses to fighting from range would have dressed. It looked a tad strange on this vessel he had chosen, but it was the same strange that the gangly Nero Scaeva had looked to them when they had seen him in the Ironworks uniform for the first time.

Alphinaud went from openly hostile to somewhat confused—Cid crossed his arms. Emet-Selch’s fake pout melted into one of his usual curled, dangerous smiles that never quite reached his cold, golden eyes.

“Master Garlond, I presume? It is most heartening to know that the reports of your demise were greatly exaggerated.” He bowed, very much like that afternoon when they and the Scions had returned from Il Mheg only to be met by the Ascian. Except this time he played the role of adventurer. A Garlean adventurer, no less. “Most Garlean civilians that fled under the cover of the Calamity were more than shocked to hear those reports—my humble self included. But ah, where are my manners? I am, much like your companions over there, an adventurer. In fact, I do belong to their group—Architect, at your most humble service.”


	22. ACT III: Eorzean Puzzle Pieces on an Amaurotine Chess Board, Part 4

Varis was going to have a field day with this sudden change of pace. Hells, the news would not even reach Gaius until everything would be brightly set aflame around him while Lahabrea laughed. Truth be told, he had mulled over this for quite a while even after Elidibus and that Ascended left—something that most people thought as further age-related issues with focusing. He let them believe that, seeing as his interests had shifted.

Any empire he built had been built on the foundation that it was to collapse at a moment’s notice, usually to bring the world to the brink while it burned. Whatever Garlemald decided to do with its emperor dead and two possible successors to their founder’s throne it would accelerate the imbalance that crept through the Source still. Elidibus had been strangely defensive for a day and then finally sighed loudly before all but rapidly telling him most of the story.

It linked up perfectly with what the Ascended had claimed, thus meaning that the mortals had indeed done what Amaurot had only ever debated about in times of peace. How _ridiculous._ And yet, somehow, _interesting._

Finally mortals that were worth paying attention to, even if it meant he would have to get his hands dirty just a little. The fact that _Hythlodaeus_ of all people had also crawled out from his hiding space to inspect the Ascended all but confirmed that something was going on that would indeed see the world tumble into an abyss there might be no return from.

Architect, as everyone called him here, played the part of a Garlean who had helped a few deserters cross the borders. His group had tragically managed to sneak into Eorzea via posing as Garlean conscripts and died during the Calamity, with him as the sole survivor despite merely being a civilian. All their dreams of joining the Garlond Ironworks had gone up in smoke with their deaths when Dalamud fell, and he said that hearing that Garlond had been presumed dead since that horrid night had merely been the final punch to his already broken spirit. It was all thanks to his fellow adventurers that he had not given up and turned himself in for crimes he had never committed. Frankly, a bit over the top for a story but such things were not all that uncommon in war stories. Indeed, the Lalafell, the young Elezen and the Roegadyn said that such tales were not unheard of. Garlond remained a little bit suspicious—good on the kid. That at least meant he was not liable to die to someone sneaking their way into his group.

Once the Scion and the engineers left for their own rooms, the mood almost immediately dropped inside the room. He had been given the story by Elidibus of course, but the barely contained hatred emanating from the older Miqo’te’s space in the room was _endearing._

What was perhaps even more interesting than that boy’s hatred for him even through the calm exterior was the assortment of sundered souls. Once the others were gone the Miqo’te had discarded the gauntlet that hid most of his arm, only to reveal an arm entirely made of the same crystal that the Crystal Tower had been constructed from. Once the glamour was dispelled it revealed Allagan royal red eyes, something that Emet-Selch had considered vanished into the pages of history books. Although… perhaps there were some cloning facilities still active enough to discharge the clones. There was no way he could have two red eyes of that intensity, and Elidibus’ choice of body all but revealed that yes, there was only one red eye.

The soul the crystal Miqo’te had was nothing worth noting. An astrologian under Head Astrologian Mira, a close friend of Alexis and overall completely and horrendously average just as Alexis had been. Hells, Emet-Selch had forgotten that that one had survived the Final Days. The Miqo’te’s soul was almost completely wrapped up in aether that shone like a billion blue suns—the Crystal Tower, very obviously trying to stake its claim and failing because it was not capable of catching incorporeal aether. Instead it tried to encase the soul, which if successful would very likely merely leave the Exarch in eternal stasis.

The Ascended girl was still the same interesting patchwork of a soul that shone almost violently in the middle of that room. All light and iridescent glimmering, shining splendidly and utterly infuriatingly. That soul had also belonged to another friend of Alexis, that one that had been a worker at the Hall of Rhetoric who had impressed several of the more skilled debaters with how fluidly she spoke.

And of course the soul of the hour, the supposed Ascian-slayer who counted not merely Ascended but also an Unsundered amongst their victims. The Unsundered in question being that failed timeline’s Emet-Selch. A bizarre thought to say the least, but he was intrigued. Apparently he had been bested by them somehow, and hells below and heavens above, he wanted to understand how and why.

That familiar blue glint, like a flash of steel against a canvas in myriad shades of blue, nearly made him flinch. Part of him wanted to snarl at Elidibus that he could have warned him that this soul was none other than Alexis, but he instead decided to do as Hythlodaeus usually did when in a situation he did not like.

He smiled.

Smiled and laughed, leaned onto one side to gauge everyone else’s reaction, and when he was met with understandable confusion or plain anger, he crossed his arms.

“Fascinating, truly. What a merry, merry band of adventurers on a mission you are—pray forgive me casting some measure of doubt on your integrity as party, however. The more people involved in a mess, the messier it is liable to get, after all.”

“Speaking from experience, aren’t you,” the shard of Alexis deadpanned and instead went to tap the crystalline one on the shoulder.

There had been an unspoken agreement between the Unsundered, underlined by their tempering—they were not to ascend souls based on any sorts of emotional attachment, and instead focused on finding those that had devoted their lives to Zodiark. Alexis being an emotional attachment, he had watched quite a few mortals flaunting their blue soul and dying horribly in the process as mortals were wont to do. This one was not going to be any different, even if it triumphed over him.

He was going to have some intense words with Elidibus about his habit of withholding rather important information, however.

* * *

He knew he was in trouble long before the trouble arrived. They had decided that they needed to sneak into the imperial castrum to release the Scions, something that Emet-Selch admitted he had very little care about. Thus he was relegated to watching their backs while they played pretend—they made for better conscripts, and his choice of a Garlean body made him a lot more suspicious to the local conscripts.

A general air of unease followed him around, which he at first attributed to the reappeared Crystal Tower and its current master. That Miqo’te was immensely uneasy around him for several reasons more than alternate timeline him shooting him in the back. Whatever was going on with that mortal he was going to figure out eventually but could not be bothered to think about right now.

He realised that the unease was actively seething and malicious but a moment before his vision darkened a little and revealed the Speaker.

Lahabrea was _seething._ He already had had a hair-trigger temper when stressed or sleep-deprived in the past, but the Sundering had intensified that temper and left him in an exhausted, guilty, angry daze that all but turned his personality by a full 180 degrees. What had been a reasonable debater and creator in Amaurot had turned into a madman who rambled without end, accentuating most of his severe claims with an unhinged cackle.

Emet-Selch was not going to give the old man the satisfaction of knowing that he was rather startled by his appearance.

“I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me,” Lahabrea snarled. “First the Emissary amongst the gaggle of mortals attempting to retrieve an airship, now you out of your assigned spot to gallivant about with these mortals, too.”

According to Elidibus, Lahabrea was needed to keep the balance that Gerun liked to talk about in the few times he crawled out of his hiding spaces. It made sense when Elidibus had broken the theory down; most sorcerers were taught in how the balance between active and passive aether affected the flow of souls and therefore their own powers. The three Unsundered would represent the active, the Ascended, half-Alexis and the crystal Miqo’te would represent the passive. Elidibus then went on to claim that they would very likely be able to lasso in Gerun as the middle ground, seeing as he refused to take either side but might be willing to work with both sides joining forces.

Emet-Selch had very clearly pointed out that no matter what, Lahabrea would represent a problem in this. What had once been objectively one of the most intelligent people in Amaurot had deteriorated in the days before Termination even as guilt and regret all but tore him apart while they perfected the Zodiark concept. He had been reassured that he was doing the right thing and despite all the blood on their hands, they had saved the city and the survivors. Those that gave themselves to Zodiark did so willingly, seeing that it would protect the stubborn remainder and that technically speaking they would not even be dead, merely ascended. After the Hydaelyn incident and the Sundering, the dam keeping Lahabrea’s mind intact all but broke and gave way to the fire that burned in his blood as part of his heritage.

He lost reason and instead gained hatred strong enough to drown out the voices that called for him admitting his guilt in this entire mess.

Which of course made Lahabrea extraordinarily hard to work with. Even Igeyorhm, arguably the only member of the Convocation who ever managed to stomach more than one droning tirade of his at a time due to having been his last and most skilled student before Termination, said that working with Lahabrea was like putting your hands into an open flame and hoping for the best even when he was being cooperative.

He ran himself ragged—which was ironic, considering that he could merely have siphoned the aether he was missing out of passing beasts or his opponents.

“The news will not have reached anyone stationed beyond Baelsar’s Wall yet and will not for quite a while—but His Imperial Radiance Solus zos Galvus but the other night passed away from old age, regrettably.”

An angry snort. “That does not _excuse_ you moving along with these Bringers of Light to _actively undermine my plots.”_

“Ah—who is saying that we are working to undermine _you?_ We could very well be attempting to worm our way into the heart of the Scions and tear them apart from the inside. A sort of back-up plan, should the Bringers of Light succeed with defeating little Gaius and his Ultima Weapon.”

Lahabrea rolled his eyes, visible to Emet-Selch solely through how his aether churned for a moment. “Unnecessary. It would take direct interference from Hydaelyn Herself to outdo that which I have planned. And you know as well as I do that Her power wanes, meaning that direct interference may as well take Her out for long enough to finish several Ardors. Either way, I win in this equation—assuming you and the Emissary _stop snooping around.”_

Emet-Selch merely folded his hands together and raised them to his face to let out a long strained sigh. “You speak with the mind behind Allag. I know that which the Ultima Weapon is capable of, and what which it is not. You have modified part of it, have you not? You would leave something of such magnitude in the hands of _Gaius van Baelsar?”_

“As if _you_ had not left things of import in that mortal’s hands yourself, O Your Radiance Solus zos Galvus,” came the immediate hissed reply, and Emet-Selch snapped his eyes back open. “Stay out of my business, Architect. And tell the Emissary to stay out of it as well—both of you belong behind a planning board and not the front lines. And I _am_ giving you the chance to get back behind one before I _slaughter your little mortal playthings and drag you back behind those planning boards with my own damned hands.”_

Elidibus had certainly not been lying about Lahabrea being an issue. But just as Emet-Selch had figured, the stubborn old man was going to be more trouble than the Emissary believed he would be.

He sort of stared at where Lahabrea vanished and waited for the mortals to return.

* * *

While the others attempted to get some uniforms, he was left with the one they called Crystal Exarch. 

He had already gone through almost every bloody Allagan royal bloodline he remembered. There was one that had somehow persisted in a Duskwight family that had vanished from the face of the earth at some point where he had lost track of them. Others had persisted in Hyuran bloodlines that either died out over time or simply thinned out so much that the most dominant trait, the red eyes, had vanished altogether. While rare enough on the Source, it wasn’t out of the question that the Exarch’s bloodline had been a royal marrying into a Miqo’te tribe. Which by itself was already ridiculous—Allag had made certain that the Miqo’te were treated as second-rate citizens at best and cannon fodder they had an emotional attachment to at worst. Looking at this Crystal Exarch made it rather clear that he was the product of an entirely Miqo’te bloodline—or his non-Miqo’te ancestors were so far back in his family tree that their traits had all but been overwhelmed by the Seeker of the Sun traits save for the Allagan red eyes. 

Well, wherever the Miqo’te came from there was no denying that royal blood ran through his veins and had been strengthened somehow through an outside source. Machinery for that had certainly existed as part of chimera programs to infuse them with more conductive blood of some sort. It was easy enough to handwave it along with likely an undiscovered by him cloning facility that somehow housed a royal Allagan clone and a blood transfusion machine and the Crystal Exarch was an attempt to learn what precisely these Allagan machines did.

There were many questions that lingered in the back of his mind every time he looked at the damned Miqo’te who glared at him with an emotion that was almost unreadable.

What interested him the most was the crystal, however.

While Allag had certainly been advanced enough to induce stasis on a living body and keep it preserved for aeons as long as someone who could operate the machine to rouse the body again, there was something more than a little… peculiar about the crystallisation. According to Elidibus it had stayed the same degree of crystal on the Exarch’s body throughout the entire time he was on the First.

He was using it as an aether reserve. One that admittedly drained rather quickly since he clearly was not a talented mage, least of all one skilled in conjury.

“Are you quite done staring at me, Architect?”

“Oh, do not flatter yourself—I am not staring because you are particularly pleasant on the eyes, Exarch.”

Crystallised limbs were unsightly things, all rough rock that grew faster if left aloe for too long. They also all clearly had the actual limb below the surface, usually merely obvious when the limb was in direct sunlight.

The Exarch’s arm was perfectly clear, blue, shining, lovingly crafted to look like an arm.

Something was going on here, and Emet-Selch leaned back and closed his eyes. Yes, those mortals would suffice for a while. The little Ascended and Elidibus had been correct—he could see himself be rather captivated by a stubborn brute who turned out to be no one other than Alexis and whatever was going on with the Exarch.


	23. ACT III: Eorzean Puzzle Pieces on an Amaurotine Chess Board, Part 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sightseeing logs let you write a lot since youre waiting around, but getting the master caster title basically leaves you no time to write since youre jumping from one place to the next and then consistently hitting the reel/cast buttons
> 
> anyway. im little miss Master Caster now and therefore the fish rage has been sated and lo and behold i sit down to write properly for the first time in a week
> 
> youll get a big fish from my inventory if you spot my wol in this chapter

“Ah, Meteor. A word, please.”

They froze halfway out the door, sudden dread creeping up their spine. It had taken them until they had freed her again, but they had realised that a wrong Echo vision would blow their cover either in parts or entirely depending on how much Minfilia saw. If she had seen even the slightest bit, well, there was no way they could let her spread that information—yet at the same time they could not simply get her out of the way just as they had gotten their younger self out of the way. Arenvald and Krile down the line too posed that same danger.

Not to mention the inevitable encounter with Ardbert and his fellows.

Still, they closed the door and turned around to face Minfilia.

Their dread vanished a little when Minfilia, despite her exhaustion, shot them one of her usual warm smiles. The same smiles that hid the fact that she was an excellently skilled debater who knew how to twist and turn words to her own advantage if she but desired to. Not that she would ever have, but that smile in particular had been part of the reason why they had decided to agree to the Scions’ request what felt like a lifetime ago by this point.

But her smile crumbled a little as she stared down at her desk.

“Are you and yours truly willing to put that much work into Operation Archon? You five are… adventurers, first and foremost, not beholden to anyone but yourselves.”

How desperately they wanted to take Minfilia’s hands and tell her that they would be perfectly willing to die for each and every single Scion. No matter their supposed allegiance, they would always consider the Scions allies even if at this point in time they merely thought of them as an adventurer and would soon start thinking of them as some sort of invincible Warrior of Light. Even if Elidibus and Emet-Selch were absolutely not in on this plan for the emotional attachments or any love for Eorzea, they wanted her to know that at least Ryne and the Exarch were here and ready to do anything for this cause.

That they had already done everything for this cause, that as far as they were concerned they were no better than the Garleans and the Ascian they were going to go up against.

“Beholden to none, yes, but if Eorzea falls, where will we go? Exarch and Emissary cannot return home. Oracle has no home to return to. Architect would be the first to be executed for being seen as deserter. And my home… are the Waking Sands. If Eorzea needs me, I will answer its call.”

Minfilia looked up, her expression so heart-wrenching that it felt as if someone had knocked the air out of them. They knew, of course—everything that had happened to them had never happened to his Minfilia. But she was beginning to walk down the road of a person not cut out for combat who wished she could do something, anything, and started feeling locked in and useless. Until all came crumbling down around them, and Minfilia received a call she never would have resisted even if she were not starved for a chance to prove her worth. And as far as the timeline integrity was concerned, there was no way around her sacrifice to become the Word of the Mother and then the Oracle on the First. Minfilia was doomed, no matter how much they and Ryne specifically hated that statement.

“Would you… would you do me a favour, then? Since you will be fighting in my stead, for our shared goal?”

“… The Ascian, is it not?”

Minfilia nodded, her bottomlessly sad eyes betraying that she was about to burst into tears. “Please. If it seems as if you cannot save Thancred or your life is endangered trying to free him… kill him. He would ask the same in my place.”

He would not be asking the same, they wanted to yell. Thancred would sooner kill himself than kill Minfilia—she did not know. She would not know until she became the Word of the Mother and would be departing for the First but moments later together with Ardbert and his friends.

All they could do was shoot Minfilia a smile and say “I will”.

* * *

“I do wonder, did that other me consider looking into who could have taken down both van Baelsar _and_ Lahabrea?”

They rolled their eyes and did not dignify that with a response. Emet-Selch merely rolled his eyes in return and shot another imperial patrol officer with startling precision.

“Really? Not even a sigh?” He shrugged vaguely and closed his eyes. “You are rather bland company, my dear.”

“This is certainly not meant to be entertaining.”

“You could still be more entertaining than wet cloth, but it most certainly appears that we both are not getting what we want—you fail to be more than a limp characterless sheet, and I do seem to be aggravating you.”

Emet-Selch, much to everyone’s general displeasure, had deliberately chosen his disguise as a Garlean. They had forgotten in the heat of the moment, but the dear sorcerer of eld as he had proclaimed himself was posing as a person who was not capable of using any sort of magic. Smug bastard that he was, Emet-Selch then went on to even startle Cid with his perfectly deadly aim.

Which led to him being asked to stay behind and to snipe the patrols off the platforms so that Ryne, the Exarch and Elidibus could take out the Ceruleum pumps in Castrum Meridianum. Since he could not watch his back, Meteor had been left to watch it for him.

They absolutely did notice how Emet-Selch’s aim lingered on the Exarch for a moment too long before he moved further to the right to shoot a rider out of a Magitek engine. Elidibus did not waste a moment down below and immediately jumped past the engine to hurl a ball of fire at the last patrolman on the walkway he was on.

A few minutes passed in as much silence as there could be in a Castrum currently under attack. They stared at their companion, almost dimly remembering the words they heard in Amaurot. That Emet-Selch was someone who carried a burden bigger than most people would believe he carried. That soft voice that sounded clearer than most other voices in that replica of Amaurot under the sea, that voice that so cheerfully pointed out something rather innocent that turned the tides of battle on the Ascian. Had it not been for that shade, Ardbert and they would have never fully realised that they were two parts of a bigger whole and thus they would have turned into a Lightwarden to end all Lightwardens then and there.

Meteor shouldered their sword and huffed. “Hey, Emet.”

“That, my dear, is _Emet-Selch_ to you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Say, humour me for a moment. Who was Hythlodaeus?”

Emet-Selch lowered his weapon and pulled himself up into a sitting position. “And where did you pick up _that_ name, pray tell?”

“In your alternate self’s replica of your lost homeworld that he built under the sea and that he invited me to so that I could turn into a monster in peace.”

For a moment, silence. Then Emet-Selch sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Knowing your circumstances makes this not sound any less insane. In fact, I would say it increases the insanity factor thousandfold—so I built a replica of Amaurot beneath the sea, and you picked up that name there?”

“Well, ‘picked up’ is incorrect. You filled the city with shades of people, and this one approached me on its own accord, citing that it was aware of everything due to you...r alternate self being distracted during its creation. It introduced itself as Hythlodaeus and claimed that you were close friends once. That Hythlodaeus also saw things that no one else saw—my ghostly companion who we figured out was a part of our Unsundered self’s soul because of the shade mentioning that we once were one and the same. I went back to your Amaurot as it decayed due to your demise but never met that shade again.”

Emet-Selch had always had the upper hand back in Norvrandt. He had been insufferably smug about it and went on and on to get on everyone’s nerves as much as possible; Meteor had since figured out that the melancholic tone he had spoken in for a moment in Kholusia had been a glimpse of the true Emet-Selch who had not wrapped himself up in his duty to Zodiark. His rage had been genuine in Amaurot just as his melancholia had been genuine.

Right now, they were fairly certain that the Emet-Selch underneath the act was going through all stages of grief, but the Ascian who shook his head and shot them an exhausted yet amused smile was not the same one from Kholusia.

“Close friends, eh? Said with just enough hesitation to sound suspicious, I presume? Well, colour me surprised; I thought him incapable of playing his old tricks on me but it would appear that he very much was involved in my demise. Hythlodaeus was my left hand. My best friend, my worst enemy. The one I loved, the one I came to despise the most—and trust me when I say, no matter how drunk on melancholia and longing I grew to be in your future, I would never have attempted to recreate someone who survived the Sundering unscathed.”

It took them a moment to properly register what any of that meant.

There was only one thing that Emet-Selch could be implying here, and it clicked several pieces into place that had simply never made sense about that apparition in Amaurot. What Emet-Selch was implying here was that it was not an apparition, not a copy of someone who had long since been sundered. But now Emet-Selch was claiming that Hythlodaeus had never been sundered—which by process of elimination could only mean one thing.

“You mean to tell me the Seer is…?”

“Bravo! Gerun the Seer was his title, still is his title as far as Convocation standards go—but before he accepted that title he was merely Hythlodaeus, Chief of the Bureau of the Architect.”

“But… but! If you would never recreate him in a recreated city no matter how desperate you got, what… or _who_ did I speak to then?”

Emet-Selch rolled his eyes. “And here I was about to praise your deduction skill! Truly, you Sundered never fail to disappoint. As for your question, I would assume you spoke to the genuine article crawling out of his hiding space to speak to you in particular and then vanishing as soon as he said his piece. It is incredibly easy to hide in a city of shades when one acts like one, and your lack of knowledge about creation in particular would have made it _so_ very easy for him to pretend a part of it rather than a very much alive outlier. No matter how distracted a creator, one cannot imbue a creation with more than base instinct or set patterns. Even were I distracted while creating a shade of the Hythlodaeus I once lo— _knew_ , I sincerely doubt that my alternate self would have recreated Hythlodaeus with the powers he both loved and loathed at the same time. Especially on a degree so high that he discerned something like a shard of a soul. No, you very likely met the genuine article.” 

He said nothing else and instead got up to slowly walk on over to the other three who had returned from their sneaking mission. 

Meteor stared after him dumbly for a moment, trying to wrap their head around what Emet-Selch had just claimed. 

All that time they had wasted on trying to find the Fourteenth, both before the Scions returned to the Source and even after. Meteor had combed Norvrandt together with Ryne while occasionally joined by the Exarch, Lyna and Gaia; the Scions meanwhile informed the rest and they all started searching high and low for anything on the Source that could have told them about the Fourteenth. 

And now it turned out they had already met Gerun, assuming he was part of Emet-Selch’s city and accidentally pushing them towards victory? On the other hand—had it truly been _accidental?_

Elidibus and Emet-Selch both claimed that Gerun did not interfere. Gerun had, however, attempted to even the playing field a little via giving some information to mortals and letting them choose what to do with it. Had he simply evened the playing field in Norvrandt as well by giving them and Ardbert a piece of information that made them lose a friend they grew to love dearly but made them triumph over Hades in the end? 

Their head was spinning a little, frankly. They would have time to think about this and tell Ryne and the Exarch about it after this mess. They still needed to find and take care of Livia and then Gaius, Nero and Lahabrea. 

* * *

Knowing that Nero would go on to become a part of NOAH much to everyone’s exasperation only to vanish and then reappear during the Alliance’s most dire hour to call them out on sending Meteor alone against a Primal that might as well have killed them at that point in time made this… amusing, somehow. Back then together with the other adventurers that accompanied them into the heart of Castrum Meridianum it had been a fierce fight. Right not Nero was driven into a corner with no way to target the conjurer who kept to the back—so far to the back that he was all but hiding behind his arcanist friend. Any ground he gained was immediately lost because Emet-Selch, eternally dedicated to making Sundered lives hell, aimed at Nero’s legs and forced him to retreat slightly. 

Under the combined spells from the arcanist Au Ra, Elidibus and the Exarch Nero rather quickly was forced to bring out his once-upon-a-time-nasty surprise. The only one who was surprised by the electrified ground and a Magitek Claw descending upon her was Ryne, but she learned from her mistake rather quickly and immediately nailed the next Claw to descend with a dagger tossed with pinpoint precision. Emet-Selch had gone through some trouble to teach her where the cores of most standard-issue Magitek contraptions were but it paid off beautifully. 

Knowing that he would simply turn the lights off to escape once pushed too far only made them grin at Nero as they blocked a swing of his hammer aimed at the Viera marauder. 

Honestly, this was almost fun. 

Knowing what would come after was decidedly less fun. 

* * *

It was the skittish conjurer who eventually asked the question that had lingered in the air ever since the adventurers had been assigned to help the main infiltration group due to also having the Echo and having survived another encounter with Ifrit. 

“Uhm… e-excuse me. I-Is. The Garlean. A-Are you with the Ironworks?”

The marauder elbowed the conjurer in the head, to which he replied with a whimper and started rubbing his head. The arcanist meanwhile crossed her arms and only her tail lashing from side to side gave away the fact that she was interested in the answer to that. 

“Alas, I am not,” Emet-Selch drawled and drew his firearm from its holster. The conjurer let out a terrified squeak and dodged behind the marauder. “Rest assured, however, that I am not on van Baelsar’s side either.”

Gaius would be descending upon them sooner rather than later, Meteor knew. It would not be long until the inference with the linkshell would make it impossible for Cid to reach them and not long after that connection was lost Gaius would reveal himself to challenge the group by himself. Right now, however, the Exarch was having an animated discussion with Cid over the linkshell while Ryne tried to make Emet-Selch put his weapon back where it belonged while also reassuring the conjurer that Emet-Selch was absolutely not going to shoot him for asking a fair question. The only two people who were quiet and rather focused on the task at hand right now were Elidibus and Meteor. 

They walked over to the Ascian—once next to him they saw that his lips were in a thin line and his brows furrowed underneath the mask. 

“Something the matter?”

Elidibus flicked an ear into their direction and then crossed his arms. “I have a feeling that Lahabrea may put up more of a fight than he did back when you challenged him by yourself. You did send the adventurers to run for their lives and he approached you afterwards, did he not? In any case, the moment he sees me and Emet-Selch amongst your group he may… very well draw upon an energy reserve that he kept hidden. He drew upon that energy during his recovery, leaving him more prone than usual due to his refusal to rest but….” 

“You worry he may tear himself apart simply to spite you and Emet-Selch?”

“I worry about whether or not you and yours can survive Lahabrea drawing upon that level of infernal power. Whether he can or not is irrelevant.”

They crossed their arms. “We could still send you and Emet-Selch to run alongside the adventurers.” 

“That may as well be too late. If he is attempting to slaughter you to spite us for any reason whatsoever, us leaving will only complicate the matter for you and the other two.”

Meteor shot Elidibus a lopsided grin. “Old man, you worry too much about the details. I’ve lived through worse—need I remind you of the time you impaled me incorrectly and much to your disdain I survived the encounter?” 

Elidibus did not dignify that with a reply, but it was clear that he continued to worry about something about Lahabrea that he had not shared entirely. They weren’t going to press him, but they made a mental note to send the Ascians running out of the Praetorium alongside the adventurers once the Ultima Weapon started breaking down. 


	24. ACT III: Eorzean Puzzle Pieces on an Amaurotine Chess Board, Part 6

There had been many things that she could have done when that door opened and revealed a perfect stranger who tugged at something deep within her in that moment. She could have screamed for help that likely would have never come. Could have refused and stayed in her supposedly perfect little sport of Eulmore where no harm would ever befall her. “Ever again” as Ran’jit had said.

Ryne had taken Thancred’s hand and never looked back from that moment on.

He started telling tales about the Warrior of Light whenever they took a break on the roads that eventually led them to the Crystarium, at first nothing more than little tales about their heroics and in very hushed voices with an almost mischievous smile on his face. After all it was still hard for her to believe that a Warrior of Light could do good rather than leave a world on the brink and full of Sin Eaters—but the more she heard, the more she wanted to know. It wasn’t until they arrived at the Crystarium and that Urianger greeted them at the gates much to Thancred’s disbelief that the more serious stories of the Source were shared with her. One glaringly bright night in their room in the Crystarium, Thancred then continued the day’s topic of Ascians and what they did to the Source and the Shards as far as the Scions knew.

His confession that he had been possessed by one came very slowly and with him staring at the closed windows rather than at her. She could feel the shame still emanating off him and she did wonder what this Lahabrea had been like. According to the Scions most certainly not a pleasant person, and the more time she had spent learning about Ascian machinations, the more she started to believe that she understood what sort of person the Ascian Lahabrea was. A villain through and through without a redeeming factor.

Emet-Selch had more than challenged that perception of the Ascians, though it was rather clear that none of them _wanted_ redemption. They were not deserving of it. She did not want to give it to them despite her hesitations about killing Emet-Selch. She merely wanted to understand what precisely drove people to these atrocities, wanted to understand more about this paradise lost. 

Lahabrea on the other hand most certainly fit her first mental image of a villain more concerned about his grand plan and how much blood he could shed in the meanwhile. Gaius van Baelsar seemed tame next to the Ascian, and his plans were rather in line with what Vauthry had wanted for all of Norvrandt. Which, she reminded herself, was all thanks to Emet-Selch’s manipulation. Perhaps there was a good man underneath that, but that good man would never be forgiven, should never be forgiven for what he did.

Seeing Thancred’s face with so much seething hatred on it was most certainly strange. Not even Ran’jit had caused a reaction like that—but Lahabrea staring at them through Thancred’s eyes made the man she all but considered her father look like a complete stranger out for her life. It was _terrifying_ on a level that she had no words for. 

It seemed so wrong, considering the tearful farewell on the First, his nonchalant attitude on the Source—now all that seemed to be there was a bottomless well of rage.

Ryne wanted to cover her ears so bad when Hydaelyn’s booming voice echoed through her skull. She saw Meteor and the adventurers flinch as well. An opponent cloaked in shadow whose hide could be penetrated by the crystals that Meteor had diligently collected on their travels through Eorzea.

“May you ever walk in the light of the Crystal,” Minfilia’s woeful farewell before they departed for Castrum Meridianum seemed more like a warning now than a genuine well-wish. The light was blinding and overwhelming—not just to them, if the other reactions were anything to go by. Emet-Selch covered his mouth with his free hand and gagged, Elidibus clenched his hands, the Exarch pinned his ears back and held his tail still, and even Gaius van Baelsar inside the Ultima Weapon made some sort of noise that was soon drowned out by the general sound of battle.

By the heavens, she did not understand how Meteor had done that just with the adventurers that worked with them. Ryne just barely managed to dodge a plume of fire that all but appeared under her suddenly; she knew that this was her Echo warning her and that anyone without it would have gotten severely injured. The Exarch clearly struggled—everyone had played his slower reaction speed off as being clumsy but it was blatantly obvious just how much of an advantage in combat the Echo was. The Scions had all be trained to a ridiculous degree and Ryne had been too, but in a plain dance of dodging and getting hits in she had soon outdone Thancred and everyone else other than Meteor.

The conjurer at least patched the Exarch up nearly immediately. The only remnant of getting too close to the Ultima Weapon and getting clawed for his troubles was the torn sleeve on his thankfully real lower arm and the blood on the rest of the cloth.

She watched the aether of the Primal Garuda dissipate and noticed another glare of light immediately afterwards. The Ascians all staggered for a split moment, another familiar voice echoed through her head, and Gaius van Baelsar went from cocky confidence to confused panic when Titan vanished from his grasp soon thereafter. It only made her reverence for Meteor’s strength greater, now that she was living through that story herself. It seemed completely and utterly insane that they had done that in a small strike group of four adventurers blessed with the Echo. Even moreso knowing that this was only half the battle.

And definitely, once the Ultima Weapon stopped its attack and Gaius barked out his confusion at them, she felt a cold shudder run down her spine when the same voice that had told her countless stories, the same voice that had taught her how to fight in a world that had given up, very coldly told the Garlean that it was the Blessing of Light that confounded him.

Elidibus and Meteor both had described Lahabrea as incurably smug about his superiority.

The expression the Ascian made Thancred wear like a mask was one of disdain. Meteor shifted their weight a little and furrowed their brows.

Something was going differently, Ryne supposed.

Indeed, rather than merely floating about, Lahabrea made a point in sitting down on the Ultima Weapon’s shoulder joints and then threw an even more ireful glare at the gaggle of adventurers. She _knew_ he was staring at Emet-Selch and Elidibus in particular, somehow. The rest of his speech went on as Meteor had remembered it—just the way they had retold the tale for Ryne and Gaia one evening in the Ocular after a particularly strange day where others with the Echo had wondered aloud why the Oracle of Light kept such strange, dark-hearted company still. 

The lack of maniacal cackling when Ultima went off made the whole situation worse, somehow. But Meteor was going to continue playing their part in this even as Lahabrea vanished once again. They called over their group and gave a very quick plan of attack.

“Architect, can I count on you to take out any sorts of minor Magitek that might provide support to van Baelsar?”

Emet-Selch rolled his eyes and confirmed that they indeed could.

“Oracle, Miss, uh. Miss Marauder. We ought to pincer it to keep van Baelsar from stomping over our casters.”

“Yes!” “Understood.”

Some other things about dents in the Magitek plating that Emet-Selch pointed out a moment before a laser beam made them all scatter and engage van Baelsar.

“Oh, before I forget! After this thing goes down—Marauder, Conjurer, Arcanist! Return to Cid and get the hell out of here! Architect and Emissary will join you—Oracle, Exarch and I will take care of Lahabrea!”

* * *

Elidibus and Emet-Selch hesitated but were then dragged along by the Arcanist once Gaius fell silent. Ryne knew that he was playing dead after yielding his will to fight to this defeat, yet once they were on their way out of here Gaius van Baelsar would get up again and drag himself out in the confusion of Castrum Meridianum collapsing. He would live on and start hunting Ascians once he recovered enough, somehow wrapping around from the ultimate enemy that Meteor faced during their climb to this era’s Warrior of Light to an ally they had never known about until circumstances brought them back together again.

Once those five were gone, however, another cold shudder down her spine warned her of Lahabrea’s return. She and Meteor looked up immediately while the Exarch took a moment longer.

“Interesting, very interesting,” were the Ascian’s first words—and Ryne knew just how off-script they were. He was supposed to bemoan the glory of man failing despite being given unrivalled, nearly undefeatable power.

“That you might defeat van Baelsar I had foreseen, but this defies all reason—there is no way you should have been able to defeat the Ultima Weapon in its powered state.”

Ryne felt a surge of light in the general area. Hydaelyn had spent Her powers to protect them from Ultima but Her presence was far from gone from this place. A slight shudder went through Lahabrea who was sneering down at them before vanishing in a plume of black smoke. He reappeared a moment later on the ground—she so very desperately hoped that the script would return to him explaining the Sundering and its effects without explaining a single thing about it and calling Hydaelyn a blight that needed to be uprooted. 

Instead, Lahabrea touched down and stood on the torched ground with a wide grin on his face. It looked as if not a trace of Thancred remained despite this being very clearly a horrific expression on his familiar face. Though perhaps this was a small mercy all by itself; if not a trace of Thancred remained while he was still alive below the Ascian’s overbearing presence, perhaps he would not remember anything once freed.

“How utterly absurd,” he said, his voice clear and dangerously steady. Somehow, that made him all the more terrifying. “Let us skip the formalities, Bringers of Light—it is clear you know entirely too much, just as the Emissary’s _little pet warrior_ does. You know my goal. Why do you insist on _interfering,_ then?”

It was the Exarch who shook his head first and looked at the Ascian. “A rousing speech on the worth of life even for creatures you see as lesser would be lost on you, so let us give you an answer that is simpler: we interfere for the sake of balance ‘twixt light and dark.”

From the way Elidibus and Emet-Selch talked about Lahabrea, it sounded as if he had once been fairly reasonable. There was a wild glint in his eyes as he started laughing so hard he had to double over, the crackle of flame an eerie background music to that. “Balance! As if your darling Mother has not _ruined_ the balance in the first place! There is no recovering for this blighted, grotesque parody of a world as long as She persists crawling about in its heart—She must needs be excised before Her presence causes all to shatter into stilled pieces. _Surely_ the Emissary told you as much.”

Ryne noticed that Meteor had their eyes narrowed and was staring at a very precise spot. She wasn’t entirely sure she followed where they were looking, but as she turned back to look at Lahabrea she started getting a fair idea what they were focused on. Despite being Unsundered, Lahabrea still had to play by certain rules. A soul without a body could not simply take control of a body that already housed a soul; much like her and Meteor, Lahabrea had to have staked his claim on Thancred with a crystal that housed his soul.

Emet-Selch had shrugged vaguely when asked about where he kept his, and then said with a smile that he wasn’t going to give them a chance to take it off and keep him encased in crystal for a while. Auracite worked on that same principle except its pull was stronger than soul crystals.

Meteor was likely scanning Thancred’s body for something odd that held Lahabrea’s soul.

A loud, overly dramatic sigh made her attention snap back to the Ascian proper. The grin that split Thancred’s face now was nothing short of horrifying, reminiscent of the terrifying flash of Titania’s face she had seen while speaking to Meteor on their way back to Pla Enni. “Whatever he did or did not tell you is completely irrelevant, however. I do so hope that you have made your peace with your grandiose Mother and your pathetic, worthless, _sundered_ lives—whatever you have done to the Emissary and the Architect to leave their normal spots I know not but I have no desire to know. All I need to do is remove you from the playing board and all will return to being on track.”

A flash of red, and not even a second later a deep black abyss seemed to spread under her feet. Compared to the horrendous lashing darkness that Emet-Selch slung about with reckless abandon, this seemed almost a little pathetic.

Then a wave of nausea hit her. It felt as if something was draining her of her energy—it was interrupted when Meteor pulled her out of that puddle.

“Necklace,” was all they hissed at her before shoving her away from them—just in time for a rather searing ball of fire to miss both of them.

Blinding light and roiling darkness were, as Ryne learned from Gaia, both utterly cold. The flames of the recreation of Amaurot had been searingly hot and agonising, as was the flame that her recreation of Ifrit managed. She thought about it for a moment as a volley of flame that painted strange arcs through the air and that burst into lingering, moving pillars when they hit the ground missed her—then she realised that whether or not he had already had an affinity of fire before Termination, Lahabrea’s perception of fire as a whole would forever be painted by that event. It made it more dangerous, more uncontrollable. Indeed, a sleeve of his robes was singed slightly as he laughed while trying to burn the three of them alive.

Getting close to a devil steeped in utter darkness and scorching fire seemed an impossible task.

Unless… unless, of course, she did the same thing to Lahabrea that she had done to Elidibus. Ripping a necklace off Thancred was only marginally harder than latching onto the Ascian and dragging him down with her, right?

Meteor was definitely preoccupied enough with keeping the Exarch covered—his lack of Echo remained a hurdle in combat, especially against another Echo-bearing opponent. But not even the Echo protected people against a fast action.

She jumped out of the way of another flame; it burst into a pillar in front of her. Meaning that for a second she was out of Lahabrea’s direct view. Ryne took a deep, deep breath and prayed that this would work. As quickly as she could she opened a portal and stepped through, praying not to Hydaelyn but to Minfilia to give her the strength to persevere. After all Meteor and Thancred had both made it out of Castrum Meridianum alive—and there was not much time remaining before it would start collapsing.

She jumped out, Lahabrea half-turned to face her. The Exarch and Meteor both shouted her name as a black cloud rose around her and the Ascian.

“Bold, but childish,” he hissed and yanked her off him, her hands failing to reach the intended target. The small, barely noticeable necklace was indeed there, and the small violet crystal gleamed mockingly in the darkness that rather quickly drained her of her energy. “Whoever taught you should be ashamed.”

Lahabrea wasted no time in slamming her intro the ground face first and immediately following it up by stomping a foot onto her back. At the very least he had the good sense to dissipate the dark cloud—perhaps to gloat at Meteor and the Exarch or to incite some sort of violent, not thought-through reaction to help her. It wasn’t as if Thancred hadn’t taught her about provocation tactics, and where Emet-Selch had been annoying to the highest degree to get a reaction, Lahabrea clearly was openly provoking a violent counter. 

“Ryne!”

Oh, she prayed that Thancred was unable to witness any of that. Or perhaps would write this off as some sort of Ascian-induced fever dream after the fact. It was hot enough to be counted as fever. Frankly, she was more embarrassed about the whimper she let out as Lahabrea dug his heel deeper into her back. 

Meteor drew their sword and started running towards the Ascian—clearly playing into the violent reaction he wanted to provoke. Somehow she had a feeling that Meteor very much knew that this was precisely the reaction that Lahabrea had been fishing for, and she bit her lips to prevent a small scream as he put what appeared to be his body’s entire weight onto her for a moment to send a flurry of dark smoke and seething fire at Meteor. 

The she felt another flicker of light. She had almost forgotten about Hydaelyn still being present, and looked up to see a strange glittering light around Meteor as they leapt at Lahabrea, their sword tracing an arc through the air. In their stories Hydaelyn had infused their weapon with enough light to blast Lahabrea to wherever the Twelve waited. Elidibus had off-handedly mentioned that Lahabrea had licked his wounds for an exceedingly long time, drawing upon an energy reserve he clearly was drawing this infernal power from right now. 

Meteor missed the Ascian with their swing. 

The impact, however, forced him to take a step backwards—or start floating to not stagger for a second. Meteor, trained in heavy impact jumps and the like, wasted as little time as they could and let go of their sword. The ground around the three of them burst into flame as a rumble went through Castrum Meridianum—the Exarch, hands clutched around his staff and face utterly pale, tried to douse the flames with a burst of water. 

Meteor grabbed Lahabrea by the collar of his robes, yanked him back towards them, and glared at him for a second. 

Then, just as Ryne pulled herself up to her feet with a wheeze, Meteor all but tore the necklace off Thancred—who, in turn, immediately went limp. 

“Raha, Ryne! Run! Run like the Flood is hot on our heels!”

They shoved the necklace into Ryne’s hands and slung Thancred over their shoulder like a sack of Amaro feed. The groan of metal and the crackle of flame told her that the Castrum was about to come down, and she coughed a little before the Exarch took one of her hands and started pulling her along. 

She knew they would make it out just fine. The Magitek engine that Wedge had called Maggie would come to their rescue, and after that they would stand in an Eorzea reborn by the flames that consumed the Castrum. 


	25. INTERLUDE V: Dawn of a Realm Awoken

“Uhm….”

It was a celebration—a celebration that was soon to be interrupted by the earth shaking and a messenger bearing bad news. For the time being she had tried to enjoy the festivities, but even Thancred had eventually shooed her off and mumbled something about letting one of the heroes of the hour let herself be celebrated.

She eventually sought some quiet away from the group, and somehow found herself sitting on a chair next to Emet-Selch, some distance away from the centre stage of the Alliance celebrating the all of the Black Wolf.

“Ask away, little Oracle, perhaps I will entertain you after all.”

Ryne blinked at Emet-Selch several times. While not the same one that she had met technically, it was hard to believe that this was not the very same Ascian who had approached them and followed them around whenever the mood struck him. There were several things she wanted to ask him, but one thing in particular burned on her mind.

Elidibus, the Exarch and Emet-Selch had vanished for a short while and then returned without a word. While that had happened, Ryne had been left to think about how curious this entire set-up was after all—and her mind had somehow wandered back to Elidibus claiming that his predecessor served as the heart of Zodiark.

The selfsame predecessor who also was Gerun’s father.

“It concerns… the Emissary. Not the one with us—his predecessor.”

Emet-Selch’s expression darkened as he sat there. For a moment she thought he was going to remain silent, but he merely closed his eyes with a small sigh. “A question for a question, Oracle. You ask me, I get to ask you something in return.”

“… Alright.”

“Well, don’t keep your audience waiting, Oracle. Whatever are you wondering about Elidibus the Elder?”

“It’s… fairly simple. It is getting confusing trying to keep him apart from Elidibus over there.” She gestured vaguely into the direction where she knew Elidibus was very likely ignoring any sort of mortal advances. “Call it ridiculous, but… what was… is his name?”

He merely let out a laugh and turned his head slightly to look at her properly. “You are almost surprisingly simple sometimes, Oracle. But perhaps that is part of your charm. Alas, I know not whether it is my place to tell that name. It has… not been uttered for a long time.” He shook his head and looked back at the group. “And if there is even one person around who is allowed to speak it, it would be—huh.”

“Huh?”

She craned her neck to see where he was looking.

It appeared to be Meteor, currently talking to an eerily familiar person. She did not have a name to go with that person, nor did she properly see their face, but whoever it was—Emet-Selch’s shoulders tensed.

“Forget that question you owe me, Oracle. Why is your dear Warrior of Light speaking to Gerun without a care or clue in the world?”

* * *

They had been prepared for each and every single person wanting to talk their ears off; they had already lived through countless occasions like that. Only in very few, much more sombre victories did people let them breathe properly and think their own thoughts. The return from Azys Lla had been quiet, dull, almost depressing. They had won, yes, their goal of stopping Thordan had been achieved but… at what price? Though the city itself had been jubilant, Meteor had preferred a more quiet corner after dodging the excited, jovial buzz of soldiers and dragons and all but cowering in a corner of Fortemps Manor to _breathe._ They owed Count Edmont so many things that they lost count by this point but that one they would always appreciate no matter what.

By the time they finally had a moment to sit down and was not bombarded by the billionth request to tell how the Black Wolf fell in as much excruciating detail as they could muster, they all but collapsed onto the chair they had found with a heavy, weary sigh. For a blessed few moments they enjoyed the quiet as the people likely went on to hound the Exarch or Ryne, wherever she had gone, for details that those two could also give.

Alas, their quiet was short-lived as they heard a surprisingly soft laugh nearby.

They opened an eye with a groan—and immediately sat up straight.

“Wait, I remember you,” they said when the newcomer offered them a mug that appeared to be filled with water. They declined with a shake of the head. “The historian we met in Gridania.”

The man shot them a smile that was rather hard to place—it seemed rather delighted, but it absolutely did not reach his eyes in the slightest bit. There was an aura of danger around this historian that they absolutely could not, in any way, read properly. Eerily reminiscent of Elidibus the first time they saw him just standing in Vesper Bay, his unreadable smile on his face as he waited for them closer to Cape Westwind.

“One would think that a hero now grand and proven would fail to remember someone as insignificant as I—but I am delighted to have been proven incorrect, to say the least.” He handed the mug to a passing person and almost dramatically dropped into an empty chair next to them. “A tragedy in the making this does not appear to be, mhm?”

They narrowed their eyes a little and shook their head.

“Believe it or not, sometimes the insufferably, incurably smug history watchers who have not been wrong about a thing do quite enjoy being proven incorrect.” His tone was light and flighty, but his eyes appeared to be staring straight through them—only Emet-Selch had ever looked at them like that for naught more than a split moment just as they rose to their feet thanks to Ardbert’s help while telling the Ascian that this was their story, not his. “Warrior of Light is quite a title to achieve within a lifetime of others that bore the selfsame title. I will so very much look forward to seeing that story unfurl—there is a tempest awaiting just beyond the horizon, hidden not behind steel walls built by Garlemald but one conjured up by the very laws of existence.”

Yes, they were absolutely suspicious now. The blank, red eyes still did not focus on anything as the historian sat there with his gaze sweeping across the gathered group of celebrants while wearing a smile that reminded them more of a Coeurl than anything else. Yet somehow there was not the same hunger on his face that had glimmered in Elidibus’ eyes when they had met him for the first time. 

The historian laughed softly and turned his head slightly to look at them properly.

Meteor startled away slightly when they saw that his gaze was focused now. It was an intense look that still seemed to pierce them, and the suspicious smile looked downright threatening now.

“Tread your path carefully, my friend. And may you ever walk in the light of the Crystal—assuming you still wish to, of course. If not, may dark Crystal guide you safely home, Alexis.”


	26. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 1

“No further reports from Emmerololth, I am afraid. She has gone into utter radio silence.”

“Intriguing, but not unheard of,” Elidibus waved his hand through the air. He knew she was about to be lost to the tides of history. “Anything else?”

Pashtarot shrugged vaguely. “Mitron reported the demise of Loghrif and said that we were not to contact him until he returned with results.”

“Warriors of Light, I presume?”

“It is my assumption as well, but Mitron indeed refuses any contact attempts and is making getting any sort of information incredibly hard. The… the Ascended from the Thirteenth also refuses any attempts at contact from both us and her fellow Ascended.”

Which meant that history was proceeding apace on the other Shards. That much was both relieving and mildly disconcerting, knowing what was at stake should all continue as it had before. “Mitron is the more ruthless fighter between him and Loghrif. Make certain he and the Ascended are appropriately punished once they return and that any pieces of Loghrif are to be reported to I or the Ascended Unukalhai immediately. Was that all?” 

For a long, long moment, Pashtarot seemed to be thinking about what to say next. His eyes were darting nervously around the room to avoid looking at the Unsundered, and Elidibus noticed him take a shuddering breath despite there being no air whatsoever in this place. “… Lahabrea appears to have gone missing.”

He had to play his part, of course. He dropped the hand he still had raised and turned his head the slightest bit. “Whatever could you mean by that, Pashtarot?”

“Repeat attempts at getting a response from multiple Ascended failed. At first we believed that he merely was not answering his underlings after his apparent defeat at the hands of the new Warriors of Light on the Source, but moving up in the ranks did not get a response either. While already odd for him to not respond to, say, I or Nabriales, Igeyorhm was also met with utter silence. _Igeyorhm.”_

“That is indeed concerning,” Elidibus said slowly. “But perhaps less concerning than you would believe. No, I would quite dare saying it is something to be celebrated; if he is indeed brooding over his defeat it means that the latest Rejoining brought about a change in him that means Lahabrea before the Fall is breaking through the surface again. Nevertheless, I shall keep an eye out for him and will let you and the others know should I come across him.”

* * *

Mercifully enough, it appeared as if the Scion Thancred forgot whatever had happened in Castrum Meridianum while Lahabrea still controlled him. Otherwise he would have proven to be quite a hassle in their way, worse so than a possible Echo vision from the Scion Minfilia could be. He but needed to recover from the shock of suddenly being back in control of his own body—the beating this time around had seemingly not taken place. Outside the collapsing Imperial Castrum the Oracle had shoved a small thing into his hands before following the Warrior of Light like a lost duckling without tearing her eyes off the unconscious Scion. 

Given their state as adventurers, heroes or not, it was not unusual for them to scatter until matters demanded their undivided attention. Linkshells were such a convenient excuse, the Warrior of Light had said with a wave of the hand and then gone on to wander off somewhere alongside the Oracle.

That departure led to the rather fascinating situation inside the Crystal Tower. Emet-Selch had suggested it, the Exarch had followed through with it and Elidibus most definitely felt like a strange tag-along with Unukalhai standing next to him.

The four of them were clustered around an Allagan holding contraption of some sort that Emet-Selch had clearly designed due to how reminiscent of creation matrix holders it was. Suspended in that contraption, floating in the air and shuddering on occasion while its occupant raged against the hold, was the crystal that housed Lahabrea.

Emet-Selch had his hands on his hips as he leaned forwards a little. The Exarch had a hand on his face and his eyes closed as he thought. Unukalhai was holding onto his coat while Elidibus had put a hand on the boy’s head as they all quietly observed. Not that there was much going on—Lahabrea had seethed in absolute indignation for a long time and now struggled against the hold wordlessly but with ire seething enough that they all felt it in the room. 

“Are we… certain that the same approach as with Emet-Selch will not work?”

Thee pairs of eyes turned onto the Exarch, and Emet-Selch rolled his eyes with a huff. “Are you dense? How many times have we been over this?”

The Exarch flattened his ears against his head and hissed softly at Emet-Selch.

Elidibus merely closed his eyes with a particularly heavy sigh and removed his hand from Unukalhai’s head to put his palms together in front of his face. The claws on his gloves softly clinked against one another, barely audible between the hum of the machine and the hiss of the tower’s keeper.

_“I know you are angry,”_ he began in plain Amaurotine, earning him a confused look from his three companions. _“And you have every right to be. But I beseech you, temper your flaring emotions for but a moment—I swear, there is reason for what you perceive as insurrection. Would you be so kind as to let us speak our part, Speaker, and form your opinion after you have heard the facts?”_

A low rumble emanated from the crystal, which Elidibus was rather glad no one else understood.

_“There is no need to get vulgar, Speaker.”_

Another rumble. This one was, somehow, even worse than the last reply and Elidibus was infinitely grateful that Lahabrea at least had the decency to reply in a language that he knew the Echo did not translate due to its status as a dead language long before the Sundering.

_“Duly noted. Anything else you want me to shove where the sun does not shine before you will listen, Speaker?”_

The Exarch threw a questioning, somewhat worried glance at Emet-Selch, who in turn shrugged vaguely with a barely concealed amused grin. He had never learned that language, but he had in fact been the subject of one particular temper flare that went down in Akademia history as the time the Speaker nearly blew up the entire aether network while trying to kill the back then newly appointed Emet-Selch and his Bureau Chief.

A grumble followed by some words that were so colourful that even Elidibus had to shake his head.

_“Once more, duly noted. Would you be so kind as to listen to me now, Lahabrea?”_

_“Old man,”_ Emet-Selch followed up in Amaurotine, which immediately earned him another indignant vibration from the holding contraption, _“were I in your position I would listen, even if darling Elidibus is and remains a nagging nanny on the look for more children to foster while chasing the thrill of dealing with the Seer as a rampant child. In fact, I have listened—even if our positions were quite different. I, for one, was not reduced to this sorry state and locked up. And you could be too if you stopped being a gargantuan arse.”_

Elidibus shook his head. “Antagonising Lahabrea will not aid our quest, Emet-Selch,” he said in plain Eorzean so that the Exarch at the very least understood where this conversation was going. Then, without waiting for a confirmation that the Sundered understood, Elidibus cleared his throat. _“While seemingly directly against the Ardor, I swear upon the name of our Lord that this will in no way hinder our goals. It is a temporary alliance, you may say, and the mortals we work beside can and will be discarded as soon as possible. But for the time being they are unfortunately necessary—I assume one of them told you that this is all in the name of balance.”_

Long, seething silence. Then, almost inaudible: _“Yes, one has.”_

Emet-Selch crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow. Of course he had never seen Lahabrea yield—Elidibus had had several times in the past, usually when reminded that their goal was the return of Zodiark. Somehow those words seemed to pierce the veil of insanity that Lahabrea had weaponised to avoid the crushing guilt.

It had taken him a long, long time to reach this realisation that he was about to unveil to four people, three of which were not even from the same series of events. But as he listened to the Warrior of Light retelling their story, there was one detail that had eventually started blinking like a warning lamp. Igeyorhm and Nabriales had been encased in Auracite and pierced with a blade of light. Emet-Selch had all but been jackhammered into pieces, much like Loghrif and Mitron had been under the combined assault of several Warriors of Light.

What had happened to Lahabrea?

His aether had flickered out like a candle someone had trampled over, but the more he thought about it the more he started to realise that perhaps a near dead Lahabrea had remained somewhere within the Eyes that had consumed him. Stuck somewhere between the Primal Thordan and the Primal Shinryu, unable to do anything. Perhaps not even able to watch, unaware of what eventually destroyed the Eyes and thus freed him from having his aether slowly but steadily eaten up by Primals that were fuelled by the same hatred that drove Lahabrea.

Elidibus breathed in slowly and then turned his head slightly.

“First, I ask you to suspend your disbelief. Any questions you may have,” he gestured at the Exarch, “the Keeper of the Crystal Tower and Emet-Selch can answer in detail, given that they know the structure’s layout by heart. Second, I once more ask you to temper your anger—righteous or undeserved we cannot decide for you, but until all questions have been answered I ask you to remain as calm as you can muster, Speaker.”

_“Very well.”_

How unusually curt for Lahabrea, who most Ascended speculated enjoyed the sound of his own voice so much that he monologued at every possible turn.

Elidibus folded his hands and nodded. “Thank you. Now then… our tale begins with a singular Bringer of Light, awoken to their morsel of power by the Seventh Rejoining….”

* * *

For a long, long time after he finished talking, no one said a thing. Unukalhai and Emet-Selch had heard the story before, while Elidibus and the Exarch had both lived through it on opposing sides.

Whatever Lahabrea was thinking was impossible to tell, considering how very deliberately he had dimmed his own aether enough that even Emet-Selch had to squint at the crystal that currently held the Speaker’s soul.

_“You’re pulling my leg.”_

_“You don’t have one right now,”_ Emet-Selch chimed in.

_“Keep your mouth shut—the adults are talking. And with adults I mean me and the Emissary.”_

He looked at the contraption with a blank stare.

_“Elidibus. One question.”_

_“Yes?”_

_“Are you fucking kidding me.”_

_“Believe me when I say I very desperately wish I was.”_

A long, crushing pause.

Then, unexpectedly, a loud laugh. “No, no. Don’t you _dare_ give me _that,_ Emissary.” All joy sapped out of Lahabrea’s voice, leaving it with the same droning, angry tone that had become his new norm since the Sundering. “Considering your dejected look, you are aware of how utterly _insane_ this sounds. Now then, let us assume for even just a moment that what you claim is true. That you are indeed from a future where any of that has happened and that you indeed allied with this mortal and the Bringers of Light to change the course. Why, oh _why_ would He ignore your pleas to cease? While His anger would certainly blind Him for a moment there is no way in all those seven hells that mortals decry so often that He would ignore the plight of creation. _He was not created with this in mind._ Whoever created Hydaelyn may or may not have given Her a suitable heart, yes—but Zodiark has a heart with a mind that has your predecessor’s wishes at heart and therefore holds no ill will towards creation itself. Why would He grind it to dust?”

Elidibus pinched the bridge of his nose. “That is why we have allied. There is something that we missed, and—“

“Secondly—He had not once reacted to our pleas. Seven Rejoinings have imbued Him with strength, yet He lies quiet still. How—and why!—would He rise to the occasion due to a mortal’s inference?”

“I have been wondering the same, actually,” Emet-Selch said with a quizzical look on his face. “As have I, truth be told,” the Exarch said calmly where he stood. Unukalhai also nodded and looked at him.

He was standing between the proverbial rock and a hard place right now—he did not know, yet none of these people would truly take that for an answer. Especially not Lahabrea, who needed convincing still.

There were countless ways that Zenos’ interference could have roused Zodiark in blind rage. From being a perversion of what once belonged to humanity with his fake Echo to any other sort of atrocity committed, everything could have happened while he was away. The Ascended had not been present for one critical moment and everything had quite literally collapsed around what was considered an impossibility.

“You have no idea, do you, Emissary,” came the low snarl from Lahabrea after a while. “Assuming you speak the truth, you would have left your drawing board to do work that others could have done. Then, as your position was unoccupied, that which you claim came to pass. Gross neglect of your supposed duties saw your plots fall.”

“If I may be so bold, Master Lahabrea, decrying gross neglect of one’s supposed duties is not something you can do without sounding like a hypocrite,” Unukalhai softly said, his face unusually stern-looking as he stared at the crystal.

“The boy has a point, old man,” Emet-Selch deadpanned. _“If anything, you ought to consider your own words and be the one behind the planning boards—how different from matrix design boards are those? Not very._ _And if there is even one forsaken person meant to be behind a board—“_

_“Hold your tongues, all three of you,”_ Elidibus hissed, frustration finally bubbling up within him like molten rock. _“Yes, I did bloody abandon my post—because someone had to go challenge their ex-friend and was unceremoniously smashed into pieces. Because someone had to go and get consumed by a Primal of their own making after watching an Ascended get slaughtered. Because more and more Ascended fell to different sources, while the carefully plotted Ardor came falling down, down, down, down! Excuse me for not being capable of watching what we all considered dormant! Excuse me for—“_

A loud, almost horrifying clap went through the room. Three heads and one aetherial focus all turned to look at the Crystal Exarch, who was staring at the Ascended and the Unsundered with his gleaming, cold red eyes.

For someone who more often than not looked like a lovelorn kitten when the Warrior of Light was around, his expression now finally betrayed how he had managed to stay composed enough for not only helping building it but also ensuring that the Crystarium flourished. It were the Allagan royal eyes and the sheer composed energy he emanated. 

“While unable to follow most of your very likely rousing and friendly conversation, I would prefer if you kept your voices at a civil level—and that you focus on the tasks at hand before you attempt to verbally tear one another apart as I am certain you four would quite enjoy. We can most certainly add the mystery of what had transpired to rouse Zodiark to our checklist. Alas, if you wish to hear the answer to that question, Speaker Lahabrea, you will have to join our endeavours. We can, of course, ensure that you remain locked here while we proceed apace, thus your fast decision on that matter would be very much appreciated. As for the Emissary, I am afraid the time to reveal that Lahabrea is not quite dead and merely recovering to Scion Minfilia will come sooner rather than later—you will need to be prepared to dispatch for that. Architect, you were requested to aid in the dispatching of the Primal the Moogles of the Black Shroud will certainly have summoned by now. The Oracle and the Warrior of Light will be awaiting you. And the young one from the Thirteenth, I would quite enjoy your presence to discuss matters regarding to Voidsent and the Void itself, seeing as my very bloodline was involved with making pacts with the Void.”

They all sort of stared at the Exarch. The Miqo’te himself shot them a brilliant smile that could have made a rock move, and Elidibus cursed himself a little for underestimating how charismatic this mortal could be once he discarded the heavy cloak of melancholia that he carried with him. If only he had thought to manipulate him rather than using the deceased Warrior of Light for his own gains, perhaps he could have dealt with the First just a tad faster and prevented any of this nonsense. 

He rubbed his temples with a moderately frustrated groan. He so very rarely let his temper flare up like that, but every conversation that included both Lahabrea and Emet-Selch was liable to send him into a blind rage these days. 

“I must send Igeyorhm and Nabriales on the right tracks,” he muttered and departed.

* * *

Nabriales had been easy to send out. There was that very mortal hunger still gleaming in his eyes whenever it came to talk of duty to their Lord—Elidibus had used that violent urge to prove himself better than even the Unsundered to his advantage until Nabriales’ usefulness met their hard limit and his erratic nature became too bothersome. 

Igeyorhm on the other hand was not so easily confirmed to carry on with her duties despite Lahabrea’s rather suspicious absence. While Lahabrea had long since shed the pride he felt for his last student before the Sundering and Igeyorhm’s affections for her teacher had long since died out due to the Sundering, there was ever a small link remaining. They both very carefully avoided showing it, given that Lahabrea spent so much time in the open and Igeyorhm still sought to repent for the Thirteenth, but she had absolutely refused to go back to work until Elidibus told her where Lahabrea was. 

He eventually managed to get her off his back by telling her that Lahabrea was very likely sulking somewhere and licking his wounds—much like Emet-Selch he would reappear once his bruised ego had recovered enough to answer any questions with his usual glares. 

Once everything and everyone had been set right, Elidibus’ path took him to where he usually lay in wait. The ‘drawing board’ as Lahabrea called it. The surface of that moon had ever been the same place devoid of colour and life, a prison built to serve as reminder that the night did not belong to Hydaelyn after all. Why precisely he dropped down and sat there cross-legged instead of standing as per usual he did not know, but he attributed it to having spent too much time with mortals lately. 

With his face in his hands and his legs still crossed he sat there in utter silence, unable to truly think of anything until a simple thought started to crystallise out of that muddy fog in his head. 

“Why… how did Zenos make you answer him after you refused our calls for so long? What atrocity did he commit to make you rise in a blind anger that you never once displayed—that you were not created with?” He dropped his hands and stared at the planet below. _“Why will you still not answer us—you, or any of our brethren that joined you at the turning points that left our world on the brink? It is clear you can… so why?”_


	27. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 2

Brooding silence was not something he had enjoyed for quite a while, although he was not quite certain where to rank that on a list of things he enjoyed. Not very high, he eventually decided and chose to rattle about in his surprisingly resilient prison.

That mortal who controlled the tower had left with the little Warrior of Light. Emet-Selch had departed with a sneer into his general direction, and heavens and hells knew not what Elidibus was going to do after he sent out the Ascended. Thus Lahabrea was left in his little prison, unable to do anything but screech out his rage.

He had, at first. He grew rather bored of screaming after a while and instead started to brood in silence. He ceased his rattling about in rage rather quickly—it was all pointless. Somehow these idiots had devised a perfect prison for him and very likely him alone.

Unable to do anything, he was suddenly hit by the realisation that he was _exhausted._ Completely and utterly exhausted. Normally he did not stand still for long enough to let that exhaustion catch up to him for fear of falling asleep and finding himself standing in that nightmarish realm of his dreams once more, but there was nothing he could do other than let it get to him for now. Unfortunately feeling like that made the nonsense tale of a future lived sound much more credible—Elidibus had cited that Lahabrea had failed to escape due to utter exhaustion preventing him from doing more than stumbling to his feet and then getting devoured by a dragon’s eyes. 

That, too, was entirely the truth. They had investigated the dragons when they had popped up on the Source, and while a lot of research merely went into how much of a threat to their plans the dragons posed, Pashtarot had eventually learned that their eyes were their source of power and could consume any kind of aether—which included incorporeal aether, or, in other words, souls.

Truth be told, there was no reason to not believe the Emissary’s words. While definitely as shrewd and oftentimes horrible as his predecessor, the current Elidibus was not someone who _enjoyed_ lying. He was nowhere near as elaborate as Loghrif when he had to construct a lie, but he most certainly was capable of pulling off a lie to make it sound like a truth. But normally lies fell apart once one looked at them from more than one angle. 

No matter how many times he turned and twisted the tale, the foundation remained sound. Emet-Selch’s longing for mortals to prove their worth was a barely kept secret based on his personal brand of exhaustion. Thus it made sense that he would jump at, sneer at, then get completely overrun by even the faintest hope that mortals were finally capable of doing more than being pointless creatures who invested most of their time in violence against one another. Now that the exhaustion had caught up to him, Lahabrea did not doubt for a second that he could have been undone by a rousing defeat at the hands of that Bringer of Light and then caught up by a dragon’s eye.

_“Not quite what you had imagined, mhm?”_

Lahabrea startled out of his thoughts when a gloved hand was put on top of the machine that kept him suspended and unable to flee this forsaken place.

_“One would assume that a mind as brilliant as yours has already long figured out that there is only one answer you can give, but regardless of what you have figured or not, it is rather undignified to see you in such a state, Speaker. Your brilliance as well as your violence are very much needed elsewhere, not brooding within this perfectly adorable little crystal stuck in a machine meant to hold the non-corporeal.”_

_“Who died and by whose dying words are you here to harass your elders?”_

A soft laugh rang through the empty room, too flighty to catch the attention of the Allagan mortal and the Ascended who were presently hells knew where inside the tower to speak. _“Were this more of a laughing matter, Speaker, I would say the Master Elidibus I never quite called father died and bound me to places I did not wish to be bound to. Alas, I am here because I wish to be—and yet I am here against my will.”_

He so desperately wished he could have clamped his hands around the Seer’s neck and throttled him. Locked up as he was, and without shadow as the Seer was, nothing of the sort was quite possible however. _“Still speaking in riddles, aren’t you, Gerun.”_

_“And still the old man insists on calling me by a title that I discarded.”_

_“You failed to name a successor, boy, therefore as long as you remain alive you will be the holder of that title.”_

_“Bold words coming from someone whose murderous intent gleams so brightly in his unfettered soul that it may as well burn my eyes out.”_

Oh, he had dreaded that student for several reasons. One, his almost comical inability to contain his powers made him a short-fused time-bomb when it came to anything relating to combat. Two, his heinous home situation more often than not had him run and hide from his parents with his closest friend, usually leading to at least one infuriated parent interrupting his research to demand answers as to where he suspected the brat was. Three, once an adult and free from his family, the brat went and became a debater on a level that almost rivalled him only to use that skill to be as much of a nuisance as he could be. And four, perhaps the worst of all—the clairvoyance. 

Had he had eyes at that moment, he would have narrowed them at the Seer.

_“… What is it that you want.”_

_“What, indeed.”_ There was a strange, almost forlorn tone to his voice—a stark contrast to his usual soft but devilish giggles. _“Speaker Lahabrea. You harbour your doubts about the veracity of Emissary Elidibus and Architect Emet-Selch’s claims. I, Seer Gerun, fortunately yet unfortunately born with clairvoyance, am here to confirm their claims. You can doubt your fellow Amaurotine as much as you want, yet you know as well as I do that the Seer is not to lie. The Emissary does indeed hail from a future bleak enough to force his bleeding hands to reach for the very mortals he had defeated but moments before all came down, down, down around him.”_

_“….”_ The vow to never lie about visions of any sort was indeed something that every Seer had to give before being given their title and seat. Lahabrea had in fact been present as the most senior member of the Convocation in that very room where Gerun swore that as far as his visions were concerned not a single lie would leave his lips. But him appearing here after so long was more than suspicious, to say the very least.

A long, weary sigh escaped Gerun as he withdrew his hand from the contraption and shook his head. _“Whether you choose to believe me or not is entirely up to you in the end still.”_

_“… Seer. Answer me one question—your answer will depend on whether I choose to believe you or not. If your clairvoyance tells you that this nonsense is the truth, do you perhaps know what made Him rise in blind rage?”_

For a moment, the silence in the room was heavy enough that even Lahabrea felt the very aether of his soul crawl and waver about in restless anxiety.

Then, a clear and cheerful laugh rang through the empty room, hollow-sounding yet shockingly full of life. Gerun doubled over, clutched his own stomach and turned around to laugh in peace with his red eyes squeezed shut and his dark grey hair hiding his face. For a minute he laughed, laughed, _laughed,_ and barely even managed to stop himself. 

_“No, I know not what you desire—clairvoyance only goes so far, and my eyes see not into paths where I am dead and gone, washed away by the Mothercrystal’s ever-blessed Lifestream. I do not see where Her light reaches when I am not present, nor do I see where His dark falls when my soul was torn apart. I cannot answer you. But perhaps a non-answer is precisely what you need. Fare you well, Speaker Lahabrea.”_

And just like that, the Seer was gone. As if he never existed, not even leaving a ripple in the aether where he had vanished.

* * *

The boy had been right, of course. There had always only been one answer that he could have given from the moment they had made their offer. Even if he would have worked to actively undermine every single thing they had done, the only outcome would have been agreeing to their nonsense terms of joining them.

He near blacked out in blind rage when the one who had ruined his plans stepped into the room alongside the girl and Emet-Selch. Oh, heavens, he wanted to tear them apart. Lock them in this place—considering they were Ascended he could have very easily done the same to them.

“As long as he doesn’t do it with any human witnesses, I unfortunately have to agree that we cannot stop him,” they said with a heavy sigh and shrugged at the girl.

The girl glared at Emet-Selch, who merely shot her a grin in return. “That… that does not mean this was not… a terrifying display.”

“Oh, come now, dear Oracle—either we suffer an unusually long battle, or I nip the Primal in the bud by shooting it and applying magical pressure to tear it apart.”

“You… you shot a Moogle Primal in the head and it _exploded_ because of your applied pressure. That burst of aether could have _killed us.”_ The girl shook her head and apparently that concluded the discussion.

They were soon followed by the Ascended and the crystalline mortal, the latter of whom wore an unusually glum expression even as he greeted his mortal companions. Last and most certainly least in Lahabrea’s humble opinion was Elidibus, an even more glum aura hovering about the Emissary as he took his quiet place in the room without so much as a greeting.

“Without further preamble, let us repeat our question right away, Speaker Lahabrea,” the one they called ‘Exarch’ said, his voice clear and calm. It seemed to belong in these halls. “We would ask you to believe us and join us in preventing a catastrophe.”

Part of him had considered telling this assorted gaggle that Gerun had approached him while their backs were turned. The fact that the Seer even still could speak after staying out of the pages of history for so long had been astonishing to begin with, but the more he had mulled over it, the more he started to realise that there was no point in mentioning it. In fact, it perhaps even gave him the upper edge.

The meaning was easy enough to decipher. Despite his tendency to speak in riddles, Gerun could deliver his points surprisingly bluntly once one got beyond that layer of deliberately covering the meaning up in strange ways. The entire room had wondered aloud why Zodiark would answer a mortal’s call after not answering the Unsundered for so long—and Gerun had given him an answer in the most roundabout way possible.

Elidibus had not been in his usual position. Despite any claims to not have any interest in returning to the status quo, Gerun had certainly grown a little homesick by now. Assuming he had seen an unoccupied space to chew one of the two deities that had ruined his home in his eyes out, Gerun would have absolutely departed for Elidibus’ usual perch to deliver that speech. Doubly so considering the ill blood that remained between him and Elidibus the Elder.

And then he had claimed that clairvoyance had its hard limits when it came to the cessation of existence.

In other words, someone had slain Gerun right then and there when he went to stand in Elidibus’ usual space, in plain view of the utterly silent Zodiark.

No matter the bad blood, harming a child in front of its parent was usually considered a terrible idea. Or in this case… precisely what was necessary to make the heart of Zodiark beat with naught but seething hatred.

Oh yes—Lahabrea certainly had the upper hand now regarding base knowledge, considering that none of the ones who fled down the river of time seemed to know that part.

Thus, with a heavy sigh to mask his delight at having something to use against them, he very slowly said “Very well, consider me on your side for now”.

* * *

That Warrior of Light side-eyed him and he glared back.

The girl had all but shoved a corpse as a suitable new vessel onto him, claiming that it was either this or he was going back where the Exarch had released him from. Then Emet-Selch had moaned about the look of that thing, and after messing with it just about enough to not look like a shambling, half-rotten husk, Lahabrea was considered passable enough.

His role was supposed to be that of the adventurer ‘Speaker’—a companion of theirs that they had set out together with but whom had taken off on his own for… a reason. After a frustrating bell and a half of the girl trying to urge him into making up a story, she threw up her hands in the air and proclaimed that she was giving up. Thus the role of ‘Speaker’ was left to be a collective collaboration effort between everyone of that horrid merry band they tried to make him a part of, and Lahabrea was to retain the details.

Something or other about being a researcher of aetheric distribution, all things that even children of Amaurot knew more about than the mortals. Something or other about being the child of Ala Mhigan refugees, thus making tracking whether a person like that existed down exceedingly hard. It was almost charmingly simple, but he refrained from poking fun at the fact that surely a refugee, given the state of this grand ‘Eorzea’, would never be given the education necessary to become a researcher.

Which led them to the current, almost pathetically endearingly stupid exercise.

Combat training in a vast room inside the Crystal Tower.

He had of course immediately departed and sat down on one of the floating platforms surrounding the main one as he observed this mess of a strategy.

The Warrior of Light was clearly experienced. Working almost flawlessly with them was the Oracle of Light.

The rest?

The Crystal Exarch was hesitant despite the fact that he was certainly not a bad combatant. In fact, he was downright brilliant in some situations—though it was clear that he was more used to fighting non-human opponents. Opponents that were more driven by primeval hunger.

Emet-Selch’s form was—and he was putting that politely—as atrocious as ever. For someone who had every gift and every opportunity to better it thrown at him, he certainly was a slouch these days. Doubtlessly he could have turned the entire battlefield into cinders if he but started using his damn sorcery skills for more than shooting a damned firearm with pinpoint precision.

Elidibus… lacked power. He had always lacked power and would always lack it, but it was shockingly apparent next to a _bloody mortal_ who was wildly outperforming him.

The one thing that was glaringly obvious after all of this was, other than the absolute lack of coordination for the most part and the fact that some fighting styles wildly clashed, was the fact that they were all but going to drop dead one by one in long, drawn-out fights due to their only source of energy replenishing being the Exarch and Elidibus, who were both very clearly not skilled with any sort of healing on more than a base level.

A few moments passed in silence, and then the Warrior of Light fully turned to pin him down with a glare that might have been terrifying had he really cared about it. “Well then, Speaker—do enlighten us. What precisely do you bring to the table if you have to limit yourself?”

They were using some sort of Allagan chimeras that had been told to stand down by the Crystal Exarch in the absence of training dummies. Lahabrea sighed vaguely and hopped back into the middle of his delightful new group of allies and rolled his eyes. At least Elidibus and Emet-Selch appeared to be fully aware of what he was going to do.

“After observing your little party, Warrior of Light, there is one _very_ specific thing I can, ah, ‘bring to your table’.”

He pointed at one of the chimeras.

Truth be told, he could still feel the exhaustion weighing down on him like a bloody cloak of agony. His hand was in fact shaking as he closed his eyes to focus for a moment and slowly closed his stretched out hand into a fist. Once upon a time it had been so much more natural to use that power, but mortals broke so easily that he usually only had to use that for himself. Spreading it across a larger area, or even onto specific people, was what usually kept a base phantomologist apart from the higher skill level ones—not to mention that the top phantomologists could repurpose that aether they siphoned out of living beings to create their phantoms.

He hadn’t used that for anything but himself in so long, he very much enjoyed the way the chimera suddenly broke into panic and tried to run away. He merely followed it with his hand, not fully digging his hands into its aether to just torture that miscreation for much longer than was strictly necessary. Just like all those Sundered he had all but squeezed until their aether dissipated, until their very souls fled their bodies, except that this chimera could not beg for mercy. All it did was shriek and run pointlessly in circles.

“Enough, enough, get to the point,” the Oracle cried after a few minutes passed like that.

Lahabrea merely rolled his eyes, unclenched his hand to snap his fingers, and _pulled._ The Chimera collapsed—and a softly glittering and glimmering cloud of aether enveloped his new merry companions.

“Is that answer enough?”

The Warrior of Light pinched the bridge of their nose. “By the bloody Twelve… and how are we to explain that? Emet-Selch had the decency to pose as Garlean using a firearm to avoid running into the issue of explaining sorcery to a more observant thaumaturge. But _that?_ That is all but forbidden arts that were banned for reasons and that would have us persecuted within moments of people learning about it.”

It was the Crystal Exarch who cleared his throat and then tilted his head when the attention was on him. “In the heat of combat this is a lot easier to hide, especially considering the sheer amount of attack-focused fighters we have. Leave enough injuries, and no one will look for signs of something or someone being drained of their aether. Unless our dear Speaker decides to turn to serial killing there is essentially no chance that anyone will ever get behind this—who would believe heroes of the realm turning to dark arts?”

“… Ugh. Fine. Just give him a base wand or something so he can at least somewhat pretend to be a conjurer. Or, hells, a book and have him play an arcanist without a Carbuncle.”


	28. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 3

They had nearly forgotten how foolhardy, nay, straight up suicidal quite a few encounters with Primals had been in the past. As time passed and they had all but gotten used to risking their life as soon as a Primal was involved, the encounter with Leviathan seemed almost foolishly easy when compared to challenging the Lord of the Hive all by themself.

The Scions were slow to warm up to ‘Speaker’, which was to be expected. He remained antagonistic to a fault and tore any sorts of strategies with a high chance of failure apart. The only person who seemed to somewhat consider his words with a furrowed brow was Minfilia—given her status as a drawing board strategist rather than a fighter along with her clear concern for the wild collection of adventurers it was unsurprising.

But much like originally, there was no other way of tackling the impeding danger of Leviathan’s rage than by doing the most foolish thing they could think of.

“In a way, it is almost ingenious,” Elidibus muttered. “The chances of it working are so low that no one would expect them to work, least of all your opponent. It completely defies all reason—which very likely is why your dear Mother went and chose you from all the possible mortals.”

Truth be told, they suspected there was more than simply chance at work by this point. But whatever the true reason behind them being chosen as Warrior of Light of this age was, it was very likely tied to times they did not remember.

Emet-Selch had been _furious_ after the festivities were interrupted—he had pulled them aside and all but dug his fingers into their shoulders as he shook them and demanded to know what the hell the Fourteenth had wanted from them.

The historian had vanished as soon as they had taken their eyes off him, but knowing that he was Gerun explained quite a few things. They had figured it out from him calling them by the name they allegedly had had back in Amaurot; logically only the Unsundered knew about that name in particular, but the Unsundered right at that time had both been present or were locked away in the Crystal Tower. Surprisingly enough, the Ascian let go of them when they snarled that they had not known any better and that it really had just been a strange, almost unsettling encounter with a historian to them; had they known it had been Gerun they would have made him stay. 

They had resolved to ask him about ‘Alexis’ when they departed for the Bramble Patch to confront Good King Mog together, but Emet-Selch had apparently been busy with something else and thus ignored their question. Whoever they had been in Amaurot hovered just beyond their reach with no way of ever learning more; there were no shades they could ask this time around, there was no way that any of the Unsundered would tell them more than what Elidibus had shared.

It had explained why they had followed the chaos in Anamnesis Anyder as if led by an invisible map, however. If they had technically overseen the place of course they would recall its layout no matter how thin their soul had been spread.

Oh, it was frustrating.

They very much let their frustration out on Leviathan, their trusty blade so much more reliable than their axe had been at this time. Knowing how history went truly was a bane more than a boon—they so very, very desperately wished to tell Yugiri that she would be accepted in Eorzea thanks to the handful Auri adventurers that slunk about. They wanted to tell each and every Doman that their work with the adventurers in Mor Dhona would turn the place into a home for all of them, even though most of them would depart for Doma once that was liberated. But all they could do was seethe in quiet rage as the refugees were turned away by the monetarists of Ul’dah and the Scions scrambled away to strike deals with each and every single shopkeep in Mor Dhona because they were _not_ going to let these people who had crossed an entire ocean with naught but the clothes on their backs and barely enough food suffer any more. 

Their anger at the fact that history needed to proceed apace was going to turn into a problem—they knew that.

* * *

The Exarch was sitting in the Ocular with his forehead pressed against his mirror that had served as a portal to the Source back when the Crystal Tower had been on the First. His ears were drawn back, although he flicked one of them into their general direction when they entered the room.

They knew exactly what was going on inside his head, and they merely sat down next to him. Although in their case they put their back against the mirror.

“Well, Master G’raha,” they eventually sighed, “it is very nice to meet you after you had your fun with me by making me play fetch.”

The Exarch slapped his tail against their leg and bristled slightly.

They had, of course, investigated both Revenant’s Toll and Saint Coinach’s Find. Nero tol Scaeva in his threadbare costume to keep his identity hidden from anyone but Cid Garlond had indeed been at Revenant’s Toll. Though rather than wait for them to pay attention to him, he seemed to have been busy with actually searching for Crystal Sand. Likewise Saint Coinach’s Find had been bustling with people attempting to work out ways to get past the barriers that G’raha had put up once again as soon as they had arrived on the Source. Even should the Sons of Saint Coinach get to the Labyrinth of the Ancients there was no way for them to truly pass to the interior from there without an enormous amount of adventurers willing to die to figure out the layout. G’raha Tia had been an expert on all things Allagan, going as far as meticulously going through hundreds if not thousands of tomes before the expedition to chart a vague course to follow barring any sorts of barriers inside the place. 

Meteor had assisted him with that for the Syrcus Tower portion, and never before had they truly appreciated a smartass before that.

They crossed their arms and hummed. “Will we need to intercept Doga and Unei once they arrive?”

“They will not be arriving for quite a while,” the Exarch whispered. “All things relating to the Crystal Tower have been… quite delayed due to one scholar’s absence. But I believe they can be reasoned with once all has been explained to them.” He swished his tail around and bonked his head against the mirror with a heavy sigh. “I want them to live, Meteor. They may be clones, yes, but to claim they were undeserving of life would be cruel. I wanted to save them—instead we abandoned them in the World of Darkness at their request. There is no way they would have survived on that sliver of the Thirteenth for long—I asked Unukalhai about their survival chances. He very calmly told them that no living aether of any sort would survive long there, blood pacts or not. Either they were drained of their aether and turned to Voidsent themselves or they would have simply turned into Voidsent all by themselves due to the aetherially sterile surroundings.”

“Like Sin Eaters, huh.”

“Precisely like Sin Eaters, albeit aligned to darkness rather than light. They died… for the Legacy of Allag. For that last royal to ever rise to the occasion just as Princess Salina had wanted. A fate worse than death that leaves them as slobbering, starving creatures—all for my sake.”

Meteor turned their head a little towards the Exarch, who in turn turned around to sit slumped against the mirror with his back. “Just as you had planned, though one would have to replace the World of Darkness with the Rift in your case.”

The Exarch let out a snort. “You certainly never pulled any punches, did you. Yes. Precisely like I had planned.”

Truth be told, they would have been more surprised by the Exarch saying that Doga and Unei needed to be dealt with in the same way that Elidibus had suggested. G’raha Tia, while adventurous to a fault, had always preferred his own blood be spilled over that of his companions. According to Krile that had been quite an issue, her wistful expression as the cold, icy winds of the outside portion of the part of the Isle of Val that they had called Eureka Pyros at the time blew her hood off turning even sadder when the topic turned to matters at hand. And Doga and Unei, while merely companions for a short time, had caught the scholar’s interest and even admiration in ways that made his eyes glow. They reckoned it had had to do with the eye he both treasured and loathed at the same time at that point in time—those two had all but banished any fears that this eye was a curse like the children of his tribe had suggested. 

Meteor closed their eyes and put a had on the Exarch’ shoulder. “When the time comes, we’ll make certain those two are free to do as they please.”

The unasked question that hung in the Ocular was whether any of them would ever be free to do as they pleased. The only person who effectively could turn around and do whatever they wanted to do at this point was Ryne; she had been set free from her duties as the Oracle of Light and while she was seen as one of the Warriors of Light of the Source now, she could very easily depart for a place where no one knew her and live out her days as Ryne. Not that she would want to, seeing as she had promised living out their days in peace without any obligations to Gaia shortly before Elidibus played his winning hand.

Even if Ryne’s idea of a peaceful life was abandoning the civilised parts of Norvrandt and taking over the Bookman’s Shelves with Gaia in Il Mheg—Feo Ul had been so very delighted and even promised that the Pixies would be ordered to leave the Oracles alone unless they wanted to play.

She would never quite get to live that life that Gaia had jokingly referred to as the life of a Kholusian crab hiding under the rocks near Eulmore. Even if the First’s events played out mostly the same, it would not be the same Gaia who had at first so aggressively refused any attempts of friendship and who wound up being the more affectionate one in that relationship. 

Thinking too much about this made their heart ache with an agony that they hadn’t even considered before. All those little things had gone down a temporal drain as they were undone to prevent the horrid end from repeating itself. Somewhere in that abandoned future, if Zodiark and Hydaelyn had not completely laid waste to the Crystarium while Zenos watched the space where the Crystal Tower had once stood, Gaia would likely stand somewhere in Lakeland and stare at the now tower-less horizon alongside Lyna. At the very least those two would still have one another—they would have suffered the same loss. And somewhere on the Source, the Scions would very likely also be at the Crystal Tower and pounding their hands against that door to ask what had happened to Meteor.

They breathed out a weary sigh and slumped forwards a little. The Exarch also let out a weary sigh when they dropped their hand off his shoulder.

A few minutes passed like that, with only the crystalline sparkle of the Ocular in the Eorzean midday sun telling them that they weren’t encased in crystal right now.

The silence broke when the Exarch heaved himself to his feet and grabbed them by the arm.

“We can sit here and wallow in temporal agony, or we can go and celebrate our first meeting. The so-called Labyrinth of the Ancients stands open still—why not retrace your steps through the tower?”

What a silly thing.

They got up with a small smile and nodded at the Exarch.

* * *

“Seriously! What is it with Allagans and dangerous liquids!”

The Exarch merely laughed harder as they ascended the stairs further—the ones that led to the Ocular were a flight of stairs that they had not taken the first time they had gone through this place. Retracing their steps through this place meant that they had gone through parts of the Crystal Tower that the Exarch often claimed were seldom visited by either the people of the Crystarium or the Garlond Ironworks on account of being off-limits due to being considered the Spire or due to not being all too relevant to any sorts of energy routing. Indeed, as the Exarch explained there was one main energy line that went from the top of the tower directly to its bottommost floor where the Ironworks had built the control panel for the temporal accelerator and where they had slain their copy of Alexander to prevent even more in the Twinning section of the basement to run out of control.

The further down the energy line went the more it started to branch out, like a tree’s roots.

“You may have to ask Emet-Selch about that. Still, it is most fascinating to hear that Azys Lla is precisely how the few mentions of it made me think it was like.”

Right up here, near the room where the Allagan Empire’s very own Amon had stood in their way to prevent them from reaching the uppermost floor. Right where they had stood with G’raha Tia just before they departed for the World of Darkness together.

They waited for the Exarch at the top of the stairs and eyed the jump pad, then gestured at it when the Exarch arrived and stopped laughing. “And these! Horrible, truly horrible, though these pale in comparison to the outrageous drop down into the Twinning.”

Without waiting further they stepped onto the pad and landed in the middle of what they could only describe as a stage. The crew of the Prima Vista would have had a field day in this place, and Meteor smiled softly at the memory of seeing Ramza taking the stage after all he had been through. That confident yet cocky smile that he managed to hold even through all that agony. In a sense, on a much smaller scale, Ramza and G’raha’s stories were surprisingly similar. 

They kept their back turned to the Exarch as he landed on the stage and looked around. Since the upper floors were not considered relevant to most of the tower’s integral structures other than the energy system the Ironworks under Biggs the Third had not particularly changed anything about the place. Not even the Sons of Saint Coinach and the Ironworks under Cid Garlond had, and thus there were some faded burns on the dusty carpet from when they had defeated Amon. They were fairly certain that somewhere there would be a blood splatter of when the Conjurer from the Praetorium had taken a creature’s staff to the head followed up by being unable to dodge an ice spike from Amon’s spells and getting stabbed through the shoulder. Hells, they were fairly certain they saw a scorched clip from their own armour as they had barely managed to dive behind an ice cage holding another adventurer at G’raha’s frantic cries to find cover. Half the curtains had caught fire from that, though the flames that guttered out by the time Amon had fallen over and coughed out a last warning intended for Emperor Xande. 

The Exarch cleared his throat. They turned around.

Much like they had discarded their usual armour for basic clothing, he had taken off the gauntlet that usually hid his crystalline arm. It shone brilliant blue as he offered them that hand with the other on his back and an almost mischievous grin on his face. 

“Welcome, adventurer, to the Crystal Tower.” His grin merely widened to the same sort of devilish smirk he used to have whenever he dodged a book they threw at him during the time they both spent at Saint Coinach’s Find going through hundreds of tomes to learn more about the Crystal Tower. “You do know its modern story, how a merry mix of the Sons of Saint Coinach, the Garlond Ironworks, countless adventurers, a Garlean and a Student of Baldesion unlocked its secrets and how the Student of Baldesion sealed its doors shut to prevent any more catastrophes. You know how it became a beacon of hope in a world so far yet not so dissimilar to ours. You know how it carried four people through time to prevent a tragedy greater than any Calamity to this very point.” For a moment, his smile looked forlorn; that crushing loneliness of having lost every single person he had known mirrored in his bright red eyes. The moment he blinked it was gone and replaced with his mischievous grin once more. “But how about you join me for a rousing rendition of the untold part of the tale—of the doors opening and the descendants of survivors asking the Student of Baldesion a single question?”

They couldn’t help but laugh a little at how dramatic he made himself sound. As if he wasn’t the Crystal Exarch but instead just G’raha Tia again, with nothing but the tower and his destiny looming over him instead of the weight of entire timelines that he had failed to save. 

“A ‘rousing rendition’? Really?”

“Naught less could be expected from a Descendant of Allag to perhaps the grandest hero this long-faded empire has ever seen!” He was even putting on a playful sing-song tone for that—and Meteor thought about one of the countless nights they spent beside Silvertear Lake, where G’raha Tia vented his frustrations with their slow progress by singing for the Keeper of the Lake as if the fallen Midgardsormr could hear him. The Father of Dragonkind had heard him, but back then the Miqo’te may as well have serenaded an inanimate object considering how little they knew about the Keeper’s state in his anger.

They let out a snort and took the hand the Exarch offered them. “Alright. But you had better not tax yourself too much, you silly old man.”

The Exarch pulled them closer, close enough that one may have mistaken them for being frozen in a dancing position. Not once did his grin change as he looked up at them. “As you wish, Warrior of Light,” he eventually hummed, only to let go of their hand and all but twirl out of their reach and bowing to an imaginary audience.

“And our tale, it begins not with dignity, but with the Student of Baldesion startling awake in a stranger’s arms and throwing up onto the crystal floors of his resting place.”

* * *

The Exarch would have made a perfect narrator for a stage play. His voice was as clear and loud as that of Jenomis cen Lexentale, though a lot more melodious. Whenever the story reached parts that had clearly affected him as he lived these events, his voice dipped lower and perfectly matched the mood. The countless attempts to find remnants of an age that each and every soul not devoted to violence dreamed of. How Ishgard crumbled under a final, decisive blow and all they could do was run, run all the way to the Firmament as the walls that had withstood the Dragonsong War finally came down, down, and were cast into the Sea of Clouds below. The strange feeling of standing in the ruins of Revenant’s Toll, of sitting by a campfire and hearing stories from the long departed Warrior of Light.

“And alas, after delivering this message from the long departed—‘twas time for Alpha and Omega to once more take to the roads, to wander a world forsaken as they had had since before the onset of Calamity and as they would until the very ends of time and space. For who else would record history in an age without historians, where most was passed down verbally at campfires in hushed, excited whispers of people that may as well meet their end the next day? ‘Worry not, Master G’raha,’ the Roegadyn said with as much cheer as he could muster, ‘for Alpha perhaps remains the stoutest ally of those who never gave up hope—he will be yours as long as you keep that head held as high as you can, after crying as much as you need to.’”

He was still telling that story to an invisible audience, but every so often, whenever he turned around with his face full of pride and agony, they both locked eyes and he could see that perhaps the childish, mischievous G’raha Tia had never truly left the quiet, solemn Exarch. He had been so grave as they went through Holminster Switch, had managed to be grave even as he put a finger to his lips and made them and the twins transparent so they could listen in on his conversation with Ran’jit.

And then the graveness had faded as they all but romped through the Kholusian countryside side by side, cutting down no small amount of Sin Eaters as Mt Gulg loomed high above their heads—only to be replaced by the grave Exarch once again when they both sat side by side leaning against a rock and looking at the distant sea while he so very softly said that there were so many things that he would tell one person in particular.

Right now, as he all but twirled around with his arms stretched out to catch the full attention of an imaginary audience and stopped with his back to them, only to go on to talk about how precise the instructions left by Cid and Nero had been that it made their heart ache, it seemed as if he was both the melancholic Exarch and the cheeky G’raha Tia at the same time.

“And yet, there was but a single, striking sentence left by Cid Garlond—for Nero Scaeva had finally outdone him in one thing, which was departing for the Lifestream first—that the Ironworks all took to heart. That would become a mantra that he would repeat to himself, over and over, until one day he would mutter it in the presence of Scion Urianger whom he had accidentally called to Norvrandt, the First’s Eorzea.” The Exarch dropped his arms and slowly sunk to his knees. He was hugging himself, his ears were drawn back and his body was shaking for a minute or so. Meteor got to their feet to walk over to him to ask if he was okay, but they had only crossed half the stage when the Exarch looked up at the empty seats surrounding the stage. “May their bravery be the unbroken thread to guide you—burn bright, and live.”

His voice finally broke, and Meteor slowly walked over as he continued his tale. Attacks on the Ironworks that cost countless lives. How they were set back by the death of a Viera mechanic who had already lived through the Calamity as but a young child and who had been instructed very clearly by Nero. How even he was injured in the process of trying to use the knowledge of the long bygone to turn the hands of time back. How this had been mankind’s greatest invention—and how heavy the blood price had been for when finally, finally the Ironworks all clustered around him to hold him tight before he departed. How even the stoically emotionless G’raha Tia then had cracked and sobbed into Biggs’ arms. How they swore that they would wait, wait for an eternity in the Lifestream even for him to join them once again, to tell them of how their future would never again come to pass.

“And thus… and thus the curtain falls… on G’raha Tia, Student of Baldesion,” the Exarch whispered and looked up at them. “For the end of his tale gives rise to the Crystal Exarch. A tale you, the audience, know by this point.”

They very quietly offered him a hand. In a strange, strange way this seemed like a reversal of their roles atop Mt Gulg. It was the Exarch on the ground this time, breathing heavily and very obviously upset beyond words instead of them on the ground, retching and unable to breathe as their entire body revolted against the light. It was them on their feet this time, quietly offering the Exarch their head instead of the Exarch standing with his staff pointed at them to reverse the flow of light and redirect it into himself with a solemn, grave smile on his face.

“G’raha Tia,” they had choked out back when his hood had been blown off, and his voice had cracked as he bade them farewell.

“Raha,” they said softly, with a smile on their face and the Exarch took their hand after snorting to himself.

The irony very likely did not escape him either, despite both situations being nothing alike.

“I will refrain from applauding—even though your performance is deserving of applause.” They let go of his hand once he stood and instead leaned over to first flick one of his ears and then wiping a tear off his face. “And… ironic though that echo will sound… Thank you. Thank you, Raha, for fighting for this world. For believing.”

They both stood there for a heartbeat. Then the Exarch raised his hands to grab them by the collar. He pulled them down before they even had a chance to react, and without a word slammed his lips against theirs.

Oh, they could imagine the imaginary audience most definitely cheering now. But it was utterly quiet as the Exarch took a step back and stared at them almost defiantly, as if expecting to be told to scram and never do that again. But it was an expectant glare that he wore now.

All Meteor could do was smile and shake their head slightly. “Perhaps the tales of G’raha Tia, Student of Baldesion and that of the Crystal Exarch, leader of the Crystarium, are over. But maybe it is high time for the tale of Raha, last Emperor of Allag, to rise to the occasion.” They took a step forward and leaned down a little to reach forward to brush a hand against the cheek with crystal cutting across it. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

His defiant glare broke nigh immediately as he leaned into their hand. “Emperor is such a high title,” he whispered. “Can’t I just… just for a bit… be an adventurer at your side?”

They both knew what the answer to that was—there was no rest for the wicked. They would never just be adventurers; Meteor would always be the Warrior of Light and the Exarch would always technically be the last Emperor of Allag, even if all that remained of the empire was a tower meant for its royalty. They did not answer him and instead leaned further down to return his hasty kiss with a slower, softer one.


	29. INTERLUDE VI: A Farewell to a Timeline

Most people would consider this the worst hiding space in all of Amaurot’s history, but he was fairly confident that unless Ophion was brought into the equation, neither his father nor his mother would ever think of looking in this place. They stuck to public places whenever looking for him—and that, somehow, made the public think that he was an unnaturally problematic child and his parents were trying their best.

Instead those two were two grown adults who started fighting over the dumbest things and unfortunately had the tendency to include him in those fights, unless his behaviour was somehow the spark that lit the latest fire. People who were good for the city seldom were good parents, Ophion tended to say with a heavy sigh as he begged him to come out of his hiding space so the argument could finally dissolve as per usual.

Most people would describe him as a moody, skittish child.

Hythlodaeus preferred being called an observer.

Hades usually groaned and merely rolled over in bed—which he did right now.

The only difference was that this time he rolled to face Hythlodaeus, who had been standing in that dark corner for quite a while to watch the street right outside.

“Middle of night,” Hades slurred softly and slowly reached out with one hand. “Not gonna come. Not gonna find you. C’mere, Hyth. Sleep. Get weird when you’re tired….”

* * *

Perhaps he was deliberately being a pain, Ophion had said through clenched teeth as Elidibus all but stalked off with him in tow.

Truth be told, he was deliberately being as much of a pain as he could manage, and he took great delight in it.

The latest argument had been about his name. He had for once started it with the full intent to lead into a shouting match. Who right in their minds named a child something as pretentious as ‘Hythlodaeus’ anyway? Then again, neither of these two were right in their minds. Their minds were almost entirely focused on Amaurot thanks to their duties. A civil servant and a member of the Convocation made a fantastic combination when it came to tackling any issues that Amaurot might have had, but he may as well have been a prop that was not doing its best for the city to them.

He did not doubt that underneath all the ire for one another was a sliver of attachment to him. But at the same time they may as well have tortured him to the brink of death and the situation would not have changed much.

The only people he had told about this were Hades and his family, mostly because they had all but unofficially adopted him to the point that even Ophion usually did not come to retrieve him whenever he bade his time with them unless an explosion was imminent. Considering that he had moved most of the things he valued to Hades a long time ago, it made packing up whatever remained in his room a non-issue while the grand Master Elidibus and his mother were busy. Something at Anamnesis Anyder demanded her attention, the Convocation had their scheduled meeting to discuss progress for the next decade—and Hythlodaeus was packing up his things to leave and never return to his accursed childhood home.

The drama surrounding that would be hilarious if the small glimpse into the future was merely the beginning. In fact, he had never been in a better mood than when he marched towards the front door, slammed the keys onto a dresser and closed the door behind him as he strutted out.

* * *

How the gloomy problem child turned into an almost obnoxiously jovial adult was beyond most people, but Hythlodaeus cared precious little about the public’s opinion of him. Very likely to the utter dismay of his parents, judging from the very strange glares he got from his father every time Esteemed Elidibus was at the Bureau of the Architect to speak with Emet-Selch. 

His mother he could thankfully avoid unless he was needed to pester the people at Anamnesis Anyder for the publicly accessible matrices to review something whenever the concept’s documents were not enough for a review. Emet-Selch was rather talented in making certain that his mother was _not_ present—but he struck up a friendship with one of the people keeping the place under control. Most people would describe Alexis as bland just as they usually talked about him being surprisingly plain-looking for someone with such famous parents, but they both got along precisely because of these comments. Plain-faced Hythlodaeus and bland Alexis, both overshadowed by the Sorcerer Hades they usually spent their time with. To them, there was nothing more hilarious than that—of all people to be strikingly recognisable, it was the short, white-haired Hades who desired nothing more than sleeping wherever he could sit down rather than the infamous Hythlodaeus or the shockingly intelligent Alexis. 

However, sometimes the gloom of his childhood caught up to him and left him rummaging around restlessly. Hades usually quietly dragged him onto the nearest flat surface and told him to sleep it off—it helped in many cases, but Hades was unavailable for this particular issue. 

“Do you reckon this is his way of getting back at me for the Emet-Selch situation?”

Alexis shrugged vaguely. They looked rather sleepy as they stood there behind their usual counter in the empty halls of Anamnesis. That late in the night only people with a mission or the sleep-deprived came here, and Hythlodaeus was not quite certain if he was the former or the latter or both at the same time in this instance. The fact that not a soul other than them was in these halls suggested it at the very least. Alexis usually napped as if their name was Hades on nights like these, but unlike Hades they were an exceedingly light sleeper—something that their partner Miltos bemoaned every so often. Thus they had startled awake as he slowly and quietly made his way to them. 

“If he really wanted to get back at you, he’d have banned you to the couch for seven centuries rather than wait that same amount of time only to shove another title onto you, Hyth. Why are you so worked up, anyway? Knowing you, you’ve already made your decision. And hells, I know you. You declined out of spite previously—so now you’re going to accept out of spite, aren’t you?”

“Sharp as ever, Alexis, but that was not my question.”

“I sincerely doubt that this was Hades’ idea. Nor do I believe that it was entirely your father’s, either. You know you fit the role of Seer to such a high degree that asking anyone else would be plain foolish, yes? Your eyes may have made you a better Architect than Hades, yes, but the Seer may very well be the role you were born for.”

He snorted. Alexis did believe in fate and that many things were preordained. Hythlodaeus could admit his approach to that belief was rather scathing due to the fact he saw glimpses of the future—a skill that he had never asked for, a skill that caused endless amounts of trouble with his parents. Had he truly been born without a _gift_ of that calibre, perhaps he could have left his home with one less unhinged relationship with his many quirks. 

The future was not an unchangeable fact. His glimpses usually came true in one way or another, though sometimes they were less dire than suggested. An instance of what had looked like Hades dying in a pool of blood had merely turned out to be Hades being his usual dramatic self as he lay in a pool of red sea water after one of the creatures in the Words of Mitron bust out of its container of red-hued water from the other continent. One instance of a little one seemingly buried underneath a bookshelf at the Bureau had been a mammet to see how a creation meant to be handled as a pet reacted to children. 

He sighed dramatically—while the future was not unshakeable fact, there was very little room left to interpret seeing himself with a red mask standing beside Hades wearing his. 

“You think too much,” Alexis eventually said and stretched with a loud yawn. “Should try to apply some of your boyfriend’s empty-skulled behaviour and sleep some more. Wreck that plain head of yours with your usual plots to be as obnoxious as possible rather than think too much about the future you see. Isn’t thinking too much about the future of something that made you hate your parents so much next to their sky-high expectations that you never intended to meet?”

“Please do not go below the belt.”

“Don’t have to if Hades does that both verbally and physically.”

“Must you?”

“I must. You are overstaying your welcome, Chief Hythlodaeus. Either you tell me what matrix you need or you return home and sleep over it—I’m on the clock, after all.”

“You’re terrible.”

“Pot, kettle; now get the hell out of here, Hyth. Do yourself the favour and stop thinking. Or think about how much you can spite your father _and_ Hades should you accept that role.”

* * *

Towards the end of days he did realise that being taught basic interpretation of visions skills would have helped him more than any sort of control over his explosive innate powers would have helped him. Perhaps he could have interpreted those glimpses differently and found a way to avoid Zodiark altogether had he but seen more than terrifying moments of people running from a burning, collapsing city as the upper parts of it started to lean and slowly crumbled onto the lower parts. 

And while he still loved Hades, he once more packed his meagre belongings and left—all because of a vision that made no sense to him. Why would Hades ever drag him before Zodiark, and what precisely was this ‘Tempering’ he heard himself mutter about in that vision? 

He needed to learn how to properly interpret his visions. Now more than ever, as he reeled from a splitting headache that revealed to him not one but two crystalline deities in direct opposition to one another. 

* * *

No matter how much he had learned since, and no matter how torn between both sides he still felt at his heart of hearts, there was no way to interpret this vision as anything but unavoidable fact. Perhaps this was the universe’s show of mercy, though the almost tragic irony did not escape him in the slightest. 

Ophion—Elidibus—usually stood in this place, making an approach to it nigh impossible. Right now Ophion would be busy setting down the last few cards to sweep the entire game in a rousing victory for his side. His side that had lost all other players by this point, considering that the Ascended had all scattered due to being hunted down relentlessly and the few Ascended of the Convocation that had not been slain had also scattered with their underlings. 

He stood there with what may have been what Hades described as an unhinged grin back in better days while all he felt was… nothing, truth be told. He had no love for this world but he had no hatred for it either, and none of it was going to matter once he said his piece. 

“I would ask if that is your way of punishing me,” he said softly, barely audible, to no one in particular. “But the time to ask silent parents those sorts of questions has passed, has it not, Zenos yae Galvus?”

Hythlodaeus had watched, of course. He had ever remained just barely out of sight as he watched the other three Amaurotines slip further and further from what they had once held dear. The Professor’s love for research had long descended into madness that was mercifully put out of its misery. Ophion’s normally reasonable if stern leading hands were steeped in blood as he tried to pull himself out of the morass of his own making. And Hades had died after the last part of him that adored people despite his aversion to crowds and being the centre of attention had been buried with the one mortal son he loved. Yes, Hythlodaeus had watched, keeping to neutrality as much as he could—but that part he had watched with an agony that he thought had died together with an unbroken world. That son… despite never approaching him and finding the actions of the Garlean Empire reprehensible, even Hythlodaeus could not help but be proud of that mortal to the same degree that Emet-Selch had been. 

Alas, as mortals tended to say, fate was a cruel mistress. 

“I would ask if you believed in fate, but I fear that this is a question wasted on you.”

He received no answer—he had never expected one. The vision had been slightly different, but there were things that could not be changed even if he acted differently. He kept his back turned to that thing that had once been mortal and now was but a parody of a living being in his eyes. That mangled soul… that incorporeal aether that twisted in agony under a fake Echo… it hurt to look at this mess in more ways than one. 

“Would you believe me if I told you that this will not be going the way you want it to go? Would you believe me that despite all your own father stewed in unexpressed grief when hearing of your demise in Ala Mhigo, that he continued stewing in a horrid concoction of hatred and despair until the very moment you arrived and cut him down, much to his relief and shock? That the deity you seek to rouse will not react the same way as your own father did? That you will not get a pliable piece for your game to hunt the Warrior of Light from this but instead will destroy all creation while locked doors keep you from your prize? That your prize will slip through your fingers like sand?”

Still no answer. 

“You… care not, do you, Zenos yae Galvus. The Warrior of Light will escape you on this course, and on any other course you could take. Zodiark, dormant as He is, will not serve you well in hunting them down even if you rouse Him. You would be better off challenging other things to find your prey. You would know several ways of doing that already, so why go for the worst possible solutions?”

This time, Hythlodaeus received an answer—and he knew exactly what would happen next. It felt like someone had punched a hole through him as reality fractured around him. 

Asking where Zenos had received a store of aether vast enough to kill a Unsundered was pointless. His voice no longer answered him in any case. How Hades had managed to still make his final request after that was beyond him, even though he had very gently nudged that Sundered who bore the same glimmering blue soul as Alexis had had along. They would have accepted their transformation into a monster with what little dignity remained, would have gently told their ghostly companion that this was the end of the road and then brought swift destruction. But rather than that path, they had taken the road where their ghostly companion offered his soul up to theirs so four hands could push against the infernal sea of light within their body to forge a blade to run Emet-Selch through. Those had been the only two outcomes, and as his duty as the even ground demanded, he had given them a small hint so they were not completely unaware of the less likely victory outcome. 

Zodiark would wake once the bare threads that still kept his soul intact dissolved. Toppled over as he was with a hand on that hole in his being only left him in awe as to how Hades had managed to do all of this standing up. 

But at the very least his voice answered him again as he coughed vaguely and then cracked a smile at the ground. 

“A… foolish choice,” he hacked and let go of what kept his soul together.

What came next were not his problems any longer, but the problems of another Hythlodaeus who would have to deal with time travellers. 


	30. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 4

She had heard the stories, of course, but she was more than plain in awe the moment she met Moenbryda.

Meeting the people she had heard so much about had already become her favourite past-time, even knowing the fates that awaited them down the line. Despite knowing that Papalymo would not survive to the begin of the liberation of Ala Mhigo she had very quickly started enjoying listening to him. Unlike Urianger he usually made a point in making everyone understand the topic in easier words when asked to, and she learned a lot about the way the Source’s scholars ticked through that. Knowing that Wilred would not even be alive by the time the Bloody Banquet took place hurt her more than she wanted to admit; she got along splendidly with this radiant young man eager to prove himself. It was rather clear that a lot of people liked him despite his rough start with the Scions in general—Minfilia looked happy every time she saw him, Yda-Lyse definitely had taken a shining to him, and even the more emotionally withdrawn types like Riol she had seen ruffle his hair when no one else was watching.

But Moenbryda seemed to fill the room she was in with her presence. Her voice was loud, eager, and her laugh was contagious like a disease. Even the more withdrawn Lahabrea snorted when she asked what the hell his issue was and that a handsome guy like him ought to smile more.

Urianger had not been exaggerating just how fantastic Moenbryda was, and Ryne was fully aware that she was all but giving her the same starry-eyed gaze that she had thrown at Meteor from afar in Il Mheg.

“If you stare at her any more, she might sprout the wings you clearly believe she has,” Emet-Selch laughed under his breath as he passed her in the Rising Stones—then waved his hand and announced that he needed fresh air.

The tragedy at the Waking Sands had been a horrendous set-back, but as things were there was more life than ever in the Rising Stones. Knowing that this was soon to take a hit with Moenbryda’s gruesome passing and the lead-up to the Crystal Braves’ betrayal was… sobering.

Meteor and the Exarch were clearly thinking the same thing, while Elidibus was preoccupied with figuring out a way to possibly prevent Nabriales from romping about. The thee Unsundered certainly masked any discomfort with the talk about ways to contain and possibly slay an Ascian, although Lahabrea’s disdain was plain on his face and merely mistaken for his usual expression. Perhaps the adventurer named ‘Speaker’ being such a horrendously rude, violent and unfriendly person had its good points.

Knowing how history played out only made things _worse._

She admitted as much to the Exarch who seemed rather nervous on this day. He managed to shoot her one of his usual smiles and put his gauntleted hand on her head for a moment. Then he leaned in slightly. “And yet it is something that you can and have to work with. No one said anything about certain deaths being entirely unavoidable. Meteor and Elidibus, believe it or not, have been working on a way to see both the Ascian Nabriales and Moenbryda unharmed, and I doubt not that we can very likely save young Wilred somehow.” His gentle smile turned rather mischievous for a moment as he turned his ears to the sides to listen whether or not someone was listening in on them. Then he put a finger on his lips. “For someone who insisted that history is untouchable in parts, I believe that successfully reeling in the Architect and the Speaker both has changed something within our dear Emissary. And we have you to thank for that, Oracle.” 

He laughed softly when she turned red and then pat her on the head. Between Meteor who fought like a person possessed and the Exarch’s control over the Crystal Tower she had felt more than a little inadequate—but much like the actual Minfilia it seemed as if her strengths did not entirely lie with combat. 

She wasn’t quite sure if she liked that fact, and she frowned slightly as the Exarch and Meteor both said that they, too, needed some fresh air.

A bell passed as more and more people started filing out of the Rising Stones to go about their usual duties or patrols. She watched Thancred complain about a hangover and Yda-Lyse all but shoving him out, saying that they were assigned to watching Castrum Centri for any unusual activity since a new Viceroy was more than long overdue to be assigned to Ala Mhigo and therefore the Eorzean troops might wind up with new orders. Little did they know that the new Viceroy was not going to be chosen until the War of Succession Emet-Selch had left in his wake was settled—although Emet-Selch had seemed more than a little surprise to hear that the winner of that war would be his grandson rather than his son.

“Pray excuse me… Oracle?”

She was ripped out of her thoughts by none other than Minfilia.

She still sometimes reacted when people said that name, especially when the voice calling the name belonged to Thancred. Part of her still wanted to address Minfilia as either Oracle of Light or Word of the Mother—it hurt in a strange way, knowing that her title came from this woman who had given everything. In moments like these Gaia had tended to flick her forehead, would have rolled her eyes at Ryne and then went on to saying something or other about her thinking too much about things and that she needed to think a little less every so often.

“Y-Yes?”

By the Twelve she had started to call to since coming here, she missed Gaia. She missed Lyna and the Crystarium.

Minfilia laughed softly and sat down in the empty chair at the table that Ryne had been occupying ever since the Exarch had left. She hadn’t even noticed just how empty the Rising Stones were now, with even less than the usual people around—Tataru and most of the Domans had apparently been roped into helping with a construction effort, and the people who remained were occupied with their usual duties. 

“I do not believe we have had the pleasure of speaking without any of your companions around—it has become rather busy with the Crystal Braves and your two companions joining us on top of the Domans, has it not?”

It was ridiculously busy compared to anything on the First, to say the least. The sheer amount of people was still sometimes absolutely staggering to her. The Lominsan and Ul’dahn markets in particular almost left her feeling a little claustrophobic at times. Not even the Crystarium during that fateful day they had returned from Anamnesis Anyder only to waltz directly into Elidibus placing down the second card that would bring him to victory had had that many people at the plaza right in front of the Crystal Tower.

But she managed an amused smile for Minfilia’s question and tilted her head slightly. “It certainly has, but I cannot say I have it in me to complain nearly as much as Speaker does in busy places.”

Minfilia laughed at that. “We are of one mind, then, very likely to Speaker’s dismay.”

“Him waking up every morning is something to His Rudeness’ dismay, but some people merely wake up on the wrong side of the bed for all their lives.”

A little rude, she thought, but Minfilia had a wonderful laugh that she tried to hide from people not present currently.

Meteor had talked about her before the Bloody Banquet after the Scions had returned to the Source. Surprisingly enough it had been Gaia who had asked about the first Oracle of Light before she became a bodyless entity that would come to save the First from certain doom and set in motion that would see the Rejoining prevented. Not the Scion who had given everything up, Gaia had then specified with one of her usual pouts, but rather the Antecedent Minfilia who was blessed with the Echo and who was a steadfast supporter of all things righteous.

How Minfilia knew quite a lot about mining and jokingly suggested that once the realm was truly saved, she would likely hire Meteor as her and Tataru’s key miner while they set up a company together. How she made certain that Meteor was at the very least somewhat okay, a frown on her face for every new scar that marred their body while taking care of Primals. How she wished she could join that battle while knowing she was most certainly not meant to fight, how she, after being told no by Thancred for the hundredth time, instead pulled Arenvald aside and had him teacher her more than basic defensive moves. It made the story of the enthusiastic optimist withstanding torture all the more believable because it was clear she was driven to a degree that rivalled Meteor.

Meteor even went as far as admitting that they lacked the sheer drive that Minfilia had had. Had she but been blessed with a mind for fighting along with her mind for politics, she would have been unstoppable.

All those things that Ryne knew she would never live up to—but as Meteor then said with a melancholic smile on their face, all those things that Ryne did not have to live up to because she was her own person.

“Truth be told, I have been curious about you, Oracle. You are… young, compared to your companions. You manage to look delicate despite your incredible strength—I would be lying if I did not say I have been admiring your determination since the very day you, Emissary, Exarch and Meteor agreed to join us Scions of the Seventh Dawn. How do you manage to keep your head held that high despite everything?”

Ryne closed her eyes for a few heartbeats before sighing out a small laugh. “I will tell you if you tell me how you keep your spirits so high and positive all the time, Antecedent. Your optimism rivals the radiance of the sun; while many would call that naive it is an invaluable asset to your debating skills. For despite all of that, perhaps the Echo grants you just enough insight to correctly judge whether your optimism is justified or not. All the Echo grants me in comparison is… brute strength.”

Minfilia tilted her head a little, clear confusion on her face as she thought about what Ryne had just said.

A while passed in silence, which Ryne almost enjoyed. She did try to think positive whenever possible—her optimism was something she had tried to teach herself after the night had returned. It had received a severe crack when they went to confront Emet-Selch; while she did not doubt they could win she severely doubted it being the correct choice. And once the Scions had returned to the Source she had certainly spent a few sleepless nights staring at the night sky wondering if all the fighting would come to an end before Elidibus made another move.

“I suppose,” Minfilia said quietly, “we both have things that the other admires in that case. What say you, Oracle—once things are as calm as this again we both go have a cup of tea together once Revenant’s Toll is finished? Without any of your fellow adventurers or Scions whatsoever. Just the two of us, so we can talk?”

Ryne closed her eyes. “I would like that very much, Antecedent.”

* * *

Something had changed.

It wasn’t Meteor and the Exarch—they had perhaps been the last people in the Crystarium to realise it, but as far as Gaia’s amused yet snide comments went, there were entire betting pools on who of the two would figure out it was reciprocated first. Lyna usually went red at those comments and turned away, which Ryne understood. Any talk about Thancred potentially getting involved with any one person on the First had been immensely uncomfortable to her.

No, it was the Exarch and Emet-Selch.

Understandably enough, the Exarch had been less than pleased about having to work with the Ascian for the longest time. Meteor themself had missed it and no one else had brought it up since it had blown over that quickly, but for a short while after their departure, the Exarch had sounded extremely short of breath and had gotten winded fairly easily. When she finally asked him about it after hearing a strange cracking noise from his direction, he had merely smiled at her with one of his mysterious forlorn smiles and said that it was nothing to worry about any longer. Apparently it had been related to the bullet wound he had received from Emet-Selch interrupting his plans, but he had refused to elaborate further.

Emet-Selch meanwhile, not having done anything on the First quite yet in this timeline, seemed more than displeased about the lack of information about things. For a schemer like him it was already bad to lack the full picture, but the Exarch in particular was surprisingly hard to read and extremely unlikely to talk about anything concerning himself unless he was speaking to Meteor in particular.

But rather than general displeased tension, all that seemed to be between Emet-Selch and the Exarch now was a vague tension.

The ice crunched underneath everyone’s boots as they made their way through Snowcloak.

Another thing she noticed was how almost flippantly neutral Elidibus still managed to be despite everything. He seemed… concerningly disconnected from any sort of emotion whenever no one spoke to him, giving him an aura of almost blatant neutrality. But unlike Gerun, whose presence had been almost overwhelmingly blank to her, there was a clear darkness radiating through all of Elidibus’ neutrality. The Tempered on the Source gave off a similar aura, although theirs were a lot more aggressive than the neutral blanket with darkness woven into it. It was as if the Tempering was there but did not overwhelm his mind.

A similar picture would have been Lahabrea, were his whole essence not a fluctuating thunderstorm that violently lashed out one moment and merely rained down heavily in the next.

Now that she thought about it, it did seem as if they all brought the elements to the table—only missing true light and true dark to complete the set. Elidibus was uncaring yet in constant motion like the wind, Lahabrea was very much the raging thunder, Emet-Selch was a constant flame that could turn into a wildfire if provoked but that also did not harm a thing if watched properly. In contrast to that were Meteor and the Exarch as unmoving as water and earth—and Ryne knew that the frost in her heart would never leave her. 

She had tried to emulate Iceheart for the return of the last element, and still the vast, empty stillness of ice and light almost haunted her. The first thunderstorm she had ever seen on the First had left her unable to sleep due to thunder being such a foreign concept to her that she could not as much as close her eyes and instead spent the night tucked away into a corner shaking. Compared to that utter stillness and tranquillity under the cover of ice, a thunderstorm seemed like a welcome small diversion.

Then again, even the arguably still water was terrifying to think about too much, and thinking too much about Meteor and their role in all of this was indeed rather horrifying.

* * *

Iceheart was a striking beauty, rivalling the equally radiant Moenbryda. She felt sort of silly having tried to emulate someone whose convictions burned so bright they became crystal-clear ice that could have overrun the world.

She was rather excited to meet Iceheart again further down the line, but there were other matters at hand that demanded her focus.

Ryne instead turned her attention to Meteor when they all slowly made their way back to Camp Dragonhead. They seemed to be dragging their feet a little, a grim expression on their face as they carried on through the ice wastes of post-Calamity Coerthas. The Exarch was engrossed in a rather one-sided conversation with Emet-Selch and Elidibus, in the sense that he and Emet-Selch were talking about quadruple the amount that Elidibus and his short answers did. She tried to lag behind as well to speak to Meteor, but she had forgotten that Lahabrea had been walking behind her—he very quietly put his hands on her shoulders and roughly started shoving her ahead.

“Forget it,” he hissed, “I will absolutely not wait for you and the Bringer of Light in a settlement full of fools riled up by the chief fool acting like an indignant child over combatants marching into battle.”

As she had very quickly learned from trying to introduce Lahabrea to people at the Rising Stones, he was an unusually prickly and utterly violent person. It seemed as if he had an empty void where other people had a heart, and by the heavens he did not even remotely try to make people think anything else. Paired with that was an intellect that had even stumped Papalymo for a moment when Lahabrea very quickly and _very_ aggressively had pointed out the centre of a corrupted crystal by simply pointing out the growth pattern after observing it for a bell.

Leftover remnants of Amaurot on the First had suggested that while he had already had a hair-trigger temper at times, the violence in particular had been a development after the Sundering.

“It isn’t as if they are trying to—“

“Whatever they _are_ trying to do, I can ensure you it is positively infuriating and it costs me quite too much self-control to not set the entire place aflame. Unfortunately for everyone in the equation it seems as if you mortals are _more_ than obsessed with talking to the one who clearly has no desire for idle conversation.”

Truthfully, Lahabrea seemed to barely tolerate each and every person. Elidibus had flatly said that expecting anything but ire out of Lahabrea was like expecting the sky to be solid. While Elidibus was fairly reasonable even at his worst and Emet-Selch was truly obnoxiously unwilling to put in more work than strictly necessary, Lahabrea had a thrumming, manic energy to anything he did while utterly refusing any sort of calm discussion. He had very openly sneered at the belief that an equilibrium could be achieved if they worked together—he had made it _very_ clear that he did not give a damn about the equilibrium other than preventing the literal end of the world underneath crystalline fists.

“Alright,” she angrily conceded and wormed her way out of Lahabrea’s grasp.

Part of her hated him quite a lot, perhaps in part influenced by Thancred’s retelling of what had happened to him and in part influenced by how genuinely unlikeable this Ascian was.

The other part was terrified.

Iceheart—Shiva—had called forth creatures of ice to assist her in defeating the six adventurers who arrived to challenge her. The crackle of aether had been overwhelming in that moment as these creatures rose, more brawn than anything else especially when looked at next to their mistress who was still battering Meteor around. Having to uphold a role, Emet-Selch’s bullets had all but uselessly bounced off the ice, leaving vague thin cracks on it but not stopping these things in their tracks. The Exarch and Elidibus, the latter of whom had also been playing a role, had become the centre of attention due to their fire spells rather quickly, meaning they had to move and were unable to sling more than the occasional spell around. Much like Emet-Selch and his bullets, her knives had not exactly been a good tool to smash the ice. 

Then Lahabrea had simply raised the wand they insisted he carried around in combat and waved it in a small circle. The dense, heavy ice aether all but seemed to turn inwards as he drew it in—the ice creatures collapsed into heaps of broken, useless ice. Not a moment later he released that aether again, this time as invigorating cloud that lingered even after Shiva froze them all solid and shattered the ice in hopes of killing them all that way. 

Elidibus had insisted that Lahabrea was far, _far_ from his full strength. If he was capable of _this_ after a short period of rest, she did not want to think about what exactly a less ragged Speaker was capable of. Possibly the worst thing was that he still walked around hunched over with fury sparking in his pale eyes—whatever this person had been like at the height of his power was utterly terrifying and made her both appreciate and fear the sheer power that Amaurotines had. 

But through all that fear, curiosity remained. It took her a few more minutes of marching through the snow before she threw a look over her shoulder to look at Meteor all the way behind and then Lahabrea still right behind her with his usual furious expression. 

“Say, uhm… Lahabrea?”

No answer. He was glaring at the trio up ahead, where the Exarch was currently busy gesturing and speaking about some sort of Allagan energy construct, which in turn made Elidibus slowly turn to look at Emet-Selch—who took a step away from the Emissary and raised his hands defensively. 

“Excuse me?”

He slowly turned his gaze to her only to sneer. 

“… Sir?”

Lahabrea closed his eyes and exhaled heavily. “Speak your piece, but make it quick. The more I have to listen to pointless mortal prattle the more likely an unfortunate fire accident becomes, girl.” 

“You are a… phantomologist, are you not? What… what precisely does that entail?”

“A loaded question for a mortal mind that will not be able to comprehend the details—why do you care? If you fancy yourself a phantomologist in the making, I _so_ hate being the bearer of terrible news, but forget about that. At worst you will turn into another Gerun who can implode on command and spend all your energy in the process, and at best you will realise just how weak you mortals are.” Somehow, despite his angry expression, his voice had softened somewhat. His angry scowl deepened as he continued. “To give you a summary that even mortals like you will understand—a phantomologist is to living aether what a sorcerer is to incorporeal aether.”

She frowned a little. “I have been wondering. The aether you draw, do you draw it from… your surroundings?”

“I draw from living beings. Residual aether is something else entirely,” Lahabrea hissed out and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Imagine your Voidsent. Sin Eaters, Elidibus called them, I believe? Those starveling creatures that seek out other living beings to consume them and their aether. I have been informed that you, somehow, were blessed with aethersight—and in fact used it on multiple occasions. Recall how living beings looked like that way; specifically those soulless, starveling creatures. They were _alive_ despite lacking a soul. A sorcerer would have been incapable of doing anything with that aether. A phantomologist, on the other hand? Those creatures are but a wandering store of aether to one versed in manipulating living aether. And that, child, is precisely what I did. While not precisely the same as your Sin Eaters, those ice idols were given life via the Primal’s aether, thus making them an expansion of living aether. Still following?”

Ryne nodded cautiously. 

“Therefore I simply drew their energy, depriving them of their energy source and instead using that energy for my ends. While indeed explosive and volatile if used correctly, it is… somewhat less dangerous for my _allies_ if I simply use that living aether to replenish their energy stores.”

In other words, Lahabrea was simply too exhausted still to use that aether for proper attacking outside of draining opponents. He would not be creating monstrosities that did his every bidding any time soon—which was both a relief and somewhat disappointing. But it had raised another question. 

“You said a sorcerer would have been incapable of doing anything with a Sin Eater? Why is that?”

“The soul, you dull child. Sorcerers draw the incorporeal—if there is no soul, what can a sorcerer do?”

She blinked a few times. She swore she saw the glimmering spires of Emet-Selch’s Amaurot as they approached the city, swore she heard Y’shtola say that they were seeing the same thing despite her only perceiving the aether around her. “How… how would a sorcerer go about… creating, or even just fighting off something without a soul, then?” 

Lahabrea rolled his eyes. “Dull child—my apologies, you are not merely dull, you are perhaps the only mortal capable of asking _stupid_ questions. The Underworld, girl. That infernal miscreation supervised by Hydaelyn Herself that you call the Lifestream. It is entirely made of the incorporeal, and exceedingly easy to tap into despite its harrowing guardian ghoul in crystalline blue, though you mortals have since lost that skill for the most part except some exceedingly stupid ‘forbidden magicks’ ideas.” 

Flow, she mouthed and thought she was standing in Fanow once again as Thancred muttered the same after Meteor explained what they had seen inside that Ronkan pyramid. 

Emet-Selch, who roused soulless replicas of his own people that were so lifelike they had almost fooled the Scions—who also roused similar recreations to aid him in a battle where he insisted that the world was _theirs,_ not that of mortals. Meteor and those champions the Exarch had summoned briefly had stood against Amaurotine and Ascian shades, one of which had been created in the likeness of Lahabrea. 

He had tapped into and likely severely drained the already weak Lifestream on the First of a considerable chunk of its power as he tried to smash the shield of light with utter, devastating darkness. 

Her mouth was kind of dry and she had never been happier to see Camp Dragonhead just up ahead, even though a handful knights were urgently waving at the returning adventurers. 

She heard a very heavy, sad sigh from Meteor and Lahabrea merely rolled his eyes and all but stormed past her to catch up to Elidibus to wring some answers out of him, most likely. 


	31. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter was a work and a half to tackle.
> 
> mild body horror warning towards the end?

Emet-Selch was starting to _get on his nerves._

Granted, he had been expecting the Ascian to make a nuisance of himself—Emet-Selch on the First may have put a pullet through his chest to prevent any shenanigans, but the worst thing he did afterwards was tauntingly sitting just out of reach while the Exarch struggled to get back up and then needling him with questions about how exactly he had managed any of that. That timeline’s Architect perished never knowing the answers. This timeline’s Architect seemingly was testing the boundaries out as obnoxiously and quickly as he could.

He and Meteor had left for the Crystal Tower together not too long ago. Elidibus had vanished without a warning and likely gone to sort things out with the other Ascended alongside Lahabrea, Ryne was still in the Rising Stones watching the crowd thin, and Doga and Unei had arrived at Mor Dhona and were on their way to the Crystal Tower—not to support the still somewhat struggling Sons of Saint Coinach who had now accessed the Labyrinth of the Ancients but had not proceeded past the intricate system of locks to arrive at the Dossal Gate, but to bypass all of that and to open the gate by themselves. They very likely knew that something was amiss, and the Exarch wanted to intercept them to tell them that there was nothing else required of them and that their duty had been done simply by opening these doors. After all, there was no Cloud of Darkness looming just out of sight and no immediate danger from anything or anyone. 

Surprisingly enough, that had been easy to deal with—when he opened the doors to the slightly uneasy Doga and Unei, they had immediately noticed his red eyes and just very quietly listened to his story.

“As unbelievable as it sounds,” Unei had said gently when he had finished, “there is no reason to believe that you would lie to us. This tower is your heritage as much as it is ours, but knowing that no immediate danger emanates from it and that it has become the beacon of hope that our original selves and your ancestors wanted it to be is heartening indeed. Knowing that it is in safe hands of a descendant of Allag is enough—is that not so, Doga?”

For a moment Doga had been quiet, then cracked a strange, almost relieved smile. “Indeed it is—but know that should you ever require us, you more than likely will find us in your hour of need.”

The Exarch had nodded at them, though in his heart of hearts he held the hope that he would never have need for those two. Not because he did not like them, no. His heart ached as they departed, in fact. He merely wanted them to walk free, unburdened and far, far away from the echoes of Allag.

Meteor came out of their hiding place inside the tower a while after the clones had left and merely said that they hoped that Doga and Unei enjoyed their new freedom. 

With that, they departed, claiming that there was some unfinished business they needed to take care of and that they would tell Urianger and Alisaie that he said hello.

He had not even taken more than a few steps back into the Crystal Tower before this harpy of an Ascian descended unto him with his arms crossed and deliberately looking into the direction that the clones had left not too long ago. The Exarch bristled but tried to get past Emet-Selch without acknowledging his presence. As if pretending not to perceive him could get rid of the issue. 

But, alas and alack, and much to his very quiet suffering, Emet-Selch merely started slowly following him around the Crystal Tower as the Exarch ensured that nothing had changed. Not that it could reliably detect any sort of Ascians who were not currently in a body of any sort.

Eventually, after shoving past Emet-Selch for yet another time to access the stairs to a higher floor, the Exarch gave up and turned around.

“You certainly know how to make a nuisance of yourself, Emet-Selch.”

“What can I say—I had an _excellent_ teacher in the art of obnoxious space inhabiting. But do indulge me, Exarch—when were you going to mention that there were actual clones of crown prince Doga and crown princess Unei around and kicking in this age?”

“Never, preferably, but seeing as you like spying on your own allies, I presume that hope was in vain.”

“Touché. It does, however, answer how an Allagan bloodline of such strength as yours still exists—they gave you some of their power, did they not?”

“A very nice rhetorical question, Emet-Selch,” he all but snarled. After all, this Ascian had overseen the creation of Allag and very likely directed its findings and successes from the shadows. Were he still younger and desperate to know answers, he would have hounded the Ascian for answers about things that still did not exactly make much sense to him, but he was older and wiser now.

And perhaps a little too jaded for his own good.

“Which only leaves one question—which family branch originates your bloodline?”

He said nothing to Emet-Selch and instead started marching to a security room with several screens to observe what went on in the rest of the tower. The Ascian followed him, a frown that rivalled the default expression of Lahabrea on his face when the Exarch continued to ignore him. One of the screens flashed to life when he raised one of his hands somewhat, and he stared at it with the Ascian frowning beside him for quite a while.

The Sons of Saint Coinach and the Ironworks had made it to the replica of the undead dragon that had once guarded that particular lock of the Labyrinth. They stayed out of its general sight and were urgently discussing how to proceed based on old tomestones they had unearthed. It seemed like only yesterday Meteor had spearheaded that group of scientists—he could swear he saw himself bounce from one leg to the other, his bow drawn and the dragon roaring down in its containment area.

If they made it past the dragon somehow, he would have to artificially strengthen the remaining locks so that their approach to the gates would be slowed to a grinding halt. While the gates would stop them indefinitely without him, Doga or Unei present, the danger of a researcher looking up at the wrong time spotting movement inside the upper strata of the Crystal Tower remained.

* * *

“It cannot have been the Refia branch,” Emet-Selch unexpectedly quipped up after an extended period of silently following him through the tower while the Exarch checked whether everything remained functional manually. “The last royal of that bloodline branch died shortly after Azys Lla was raised into the skies—I did keep track of them to the most minuscule detail.”

The Exarch, who had been messing with a modified Magitek core inside a patrolling machine that someone from the Ironworks had jokingly called the Thermocoil Beat-upmaster due to the curious addition of claws to it when engaged in battle mode, turned his ears towards the Ascian for a moment and then shook his head.

Should he simply admit that he still had no idea which family branch had had Salina in its tree and that he also was quite uncertain whether it had simply been a blood transfusion as Doga and Unei and his suspicions suggested or perhaps Desch and Salina had been more involved than that? On the other hand, as annoying as Emet-Selch and his constant observation had gotten over the short time he had been in their party, it was rather amusing to watch him squirm under the weight of curiosity.

“Were you of the Arc branch, you most certainly would be an excellent mage, no matter how thin the royal blood ran within you by this point. The Luneth and Ingus branches are likewise very unlikely—what with the former perishing wholesale in Amon’s attempts to create a second Xande….”

“Even I, as but a child still roaming my tribe’s ancestral grounds, knew that being a descendant of the four major Allagan royal bloodlines was an impossibility, so thank you kindly for confirming what does not need to be confirmed.”

Emet-Selch rolled his eyes and the Exarch pat the machine on the top to switch it back on so it could proceed with its patrols. It beeped at them, and they both watched it float off.

When the Exarch moved again, Emet-Selch crossed his arms and followed quietly for a while.

“Of the lesser branches, you very likely are not related to the delightful little clones; the Topapa branch is unlikely. Though… perhaps these sneaky little ones did build a cloning facility in Ur. It would be far enough away to escape my gaze for a while.”

The Ascian continued muttering to himself as they walked. The Exarch heard several names of royals and even settlements, leaving the Exarch wondering what branch Salina had been a descendant of in the first place. There was so precious little known about her despite her being one of the very few royal survivors of the Calamity. Not to mention the fact that she and Desch had wound up on the other side of Hydaelyn, with him even staying behind once they passed through the G tribe’s home.

Allag was a mystery for the most part, but its people were even more mysterious than that. He had hoped the Crystal Tower would reveal more than what he desired to know, but in the end he had not exactly gotten more than that and a burden he often thought would break him before he accepted it after departing the Calamity-ridden Source to help a world on the brink.

For how confident he had been as they explored the tower before Doga and Unei unsettled him on the fundamental level, he had been almost too scared to leave the Ironworks in the future he believed that had awaited him and him specifically.

Emet-Selch continued rambling, rapidly listing places and names hoping that anything, anything would get a reaction out of the Exarch.

Eventually, the Exarch raised a hand to make the Ascian shut up. “I will tell you what I know under one condition, Emet-Selch. You tell me more about the beginnings of Allag and its people in return.”

“Very well,” came the reply, which sounded as if the Ascian was clenching his jaw behind the Exarch.

A begrudging agreement was better than nothing, and the Exarch sighed and shrugged. “All I know is that the Crystal Tower and royal blood were entrusted to my ancestor Desch by a woman named Salina.”

For a moment all was still.

Then Emet-Selch let out a groan and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, for the love of—you’re _serious,_ aren’t you. You mean to tell me the insignificant, sickly and _pacifist_ Aria branch is the reason there exists someone who can use the Crystal Tower _without_ being a direct clone?”

“This is the first time I hear of a branch called Aria.”

“Well, of course—they did not involve themselves in Allagan conquests for the longest time. Neither were they all too interested in advancing technology—they were biologists who turned from the arts after chimerical advancements were made. Subsequently they all but vanished from the pages of history despite being under near constant watch from others with claim to the throne. I had thought them dead in the Ardor with most of the other branches, but it would appear that I was quite mistaken.” A loud snort echoed through the Crystal Tower. “Little Salina and the cowardly Desch, of all Allagans to ever in retrospect become a thorn in my side. And here I genuinely believed that the worst one would be that entire business with Saronia being collateral in raising Azys Lla.”

The Exarch blinked a few times and watched Emet-Selch wave one of his hands around in defeat.

“That also explains how and where the royal bloodline intersected with a Miqo’te tribe. How… underwhelming a revelation for what seemed so interesting a mystery. Well then, Exarch, I believe you have earned yourself some answers about Allag.”

* * *

“Of course, that meant that in the subsequent battle for dominance, the Refia branch and the City of Kalzus on what you now call Vylbrand were completely obliterated.”

He did not admit such out loud, but his head was spinning.

There had been so much speculation and conjecture in every book on Allag that he all but devoured back on Val. Galuf had often laughed whenever someone came to him to tell him that G’raha Tia was sitting on a bookshelf and did not react to anyone’s almost desperate pleas for him to come down and at the very least eat something. It had infuriated him as much as it had interested him—and that had given birth to his almost obsessive desire to unlock the secrets of Allag in his lifetime. He had forwarded all his own speculations after making Meteor read other historians’ in those books that he had brought with him to Saint Coinach’s Find. His tent had been a desolate wasteland of books and barely any space for anyone but a single Hyur and a single Miqo’te to sit and spend entire nights going through endless scrolls of paper as they tried to connect the dots.

Emet-Selch, on account of being effectively immortal and _very_ involved with the foundation of Allag, shattered countless theories that historians came up with and did not even know just how utterly groundbreaking near every sentence of his was.

“The bloodshed thanks to that one singular spell, I believe, was what Amon eventually based his little magic companions on. What were they called again… well, whatever their names, it matters little seeing as your Warrior of Light and you very likely slaughtered them by the dozens while climbing the tower for the first time to rid it of any traces of Amon’s shenanigans. Whatever their names, they were based on the fact that they believed darkness to be an inactive element, therefore lending enormous destructive power to their spells because the dark is anything but inactive. It may have very well wound up destroying the Crystal Tower had Allag not gone down the way it did in the end.”

He did not ask, but he knew that either way out for the Allagan Empire would have been perfect to tip the scales enough for the Ardor.

After that, they both remained quiet for a while, with the Exarch checking more machinery left by the Ironworks to ensure the tower worked without endangering its occupant any more than the unknown did.

Emet-Selch tapped his foot and leaned over the machines as well to watch him, which the Exarch tolerated with his ears drawn back. After all, the Ascian had answered each and every single question about Allag he had had up until this point. There was just about nothing the Architect could do to these machines anyway; he did not know their blueprints and their purpose was nebulous at best to someone who did not know about them. At the very least he knew better than to fumble with the machines while the Exarch checked whether they needed proper maintenance or not.

Eventually, however, the Exarch noticed that the Ascian was very much not paying attention to the machines—he was watching his crystalline arm.

The dread he started feeling was cold, utterly cold. It raised every hair on his body.

The crystal was the last mystery of the Crystal Exarch that he had not let anyone solve—all of them had stopped at one half of the whole truth and he let them believe whatever they wanted about the other half. What most people understood nigh immediately was that the crystal was what linked him to the Crystal Tower and effectively the source of his longevity. What no one ever got right was how the crystal had gotten there.

It seemed so much more plausible that it had grown to encase his actual body.

But with the Ascian staring at him like that, he knew it was only a matter of time before the Architect figured out what precisely was going on here. The Exarch nervously watched as Emet-Selch turned to look at the walls of the tower that glittered bright blue under the Eorzean sun. The light filtered in—and fell through his hand unobstructed by anything.

“Biologists,” Emet-Selch eventually muttered, “who quit… after… huh.”

The Exarch nervously messed with a loose cable that he needed to firmly reattach to the machine.

“Say, Exarch. Do people believe that your body has been encased in crystal after you linked yourself to it, like Xande did?”

“….”

“I will take that as an affirmative grumble. Do entertain my conjecture for a moment, though—there is no limb encased there, correct?”

The Exarch wordlessly got up after reattaching the cable properly and started marching off. The Ascian understood that he was to follow, and he very quickly marched through several pathways that no one had taken since the very last round of inspections before he departed from a world forsaken. There were countless machines and apparatuses littered about that served very specific purposes. One had been hooked into the tower’s energy distribution system to send certain impulses up to the starting point. Another had been placed on the wall to read the general solar absorption rate—the Exarch knew that it had broken after but a week on the First due to the blindingly bright skies all but hypercharging the Crystal Tower. They passed a part of the wall that had been misappropriated as a message board by the Ironworks; while they had worked on their project it had been mostly notes meant for changing shifts to tell them about what had been done, what had hit a snag in the road, what needed to be finished before another thing. Now all that remained on these boards were very faded little notes that contained the Ironworks’ farewells and good lucks, encouragements and promises that they would wait for him once his duty was done and they would return to Hydaelyn together knowing that their sacrifices had saved the world.

He stopped in front of these notes, with the Ascian beside him.

“Before I confirm or deny your theory, promise me that whatever you hear here will never leave your lips around the others. I care not if you tell your fellow Ascians, but neither the Oracle nor the Warrior of Light are ever to hear even a word of this. Am I clear?”

“As crystal.”

“A terrible, terrible joke, Emet-Selch. But you are correct. There is no limb encased in crystal.”

The Ascian nodded and crossed his arms while clearly reading over a few notes on the board. “Which leaves the question—“

“I did not remove it because I wanted to,” the Exarch swiftly interjected. “In fact, I would have quite liked keeping my arm, but in a world ruled by violence one cannot avoid injuries. If you fail to dodge, you lose your head. If you dodge you get out unscathed. If you dodge too slow to avoid it but fast enough to keep your head, however….”

There was one book in the Crystal Tower that was, for all intents and purposes, unreadable for the most part. They had all but stormed into the lawless land that was the former capital of Garlemald in that future to retrieve one thing in particular—a log of an imperial scribe to keep track of what was going on. According to Biggs there was no one around to spot and attack them—wishful thinking. Of course there were people around that horrendous place full of destroyed Magitek replicas that were clearly made in the Ultima Weapon’s image. All those prototypes had been scrapped and destroyed for the most part, but as they came back through the way they had come in, G’raha had seen the glint of _something_ just a moment too late.

He had blacked out then, and when he came to again he had been inside the Crystal Tower.

According to a ghastly pale Biggs and several Ironworks medics, the people there had found that something of these prototypes still worked. And they had turned it on these intruders in uniforms.

It had taken him until way later, when Meteor returned from the Source looking rather rattled and telling the story of a machine called the Ruby Weapon, that he put one and two together. It had been a prototype of what became the Ruby Weapon’s flexible, extensible claws that had been aimed at his throat and that he only managed to redirect into his shoulder. It had, of course, torn the arm off. He had nearly bled to death in Biggs’ arms as they _ran_ back to the airship, the medics all weaving whatever spells they could while running.

“While I would have been fine living with a limb gone in any other era, it was far from ideal in a world that relied on someone’s strength. Far from ideal for departing into the unknown, too. Thus, perhaps in a bout of both genius and desperation, I recalled Xande and chiselled myself a replacement arm out of crystal. The rest, as you can see, encases the parts it does, but the arm itself is purely crystalline. The crystal will, inevitably, start growing by itself. As immortal as I appear, the crystal will grow to replace lost parts of my body, accelerating that process. I am immortal, yes, but I am not eternal. One day, far, far into the future, the crystal will encase me completely. That is the deal I made with the Crystal Tower to obtain as much power as I have today. That is why it does my every bidding—it will eventually consume me whole.”

Emet-Selch’s eyes were focused on the notes still, but he had narrowed them while the Exarch spoke.

The note he appeared to be stuck on was from one of the medics, a cheerful young Miqo’te whom the Exarch had struck up somewhat of a friendship with. She had tried time and time again to figure out ways to prevent the crystal from growing after it partially crept up his neck back in that forsaken future. Her handwriting was fine and small for a person he had helped teach how to read and write despite her being technically older than him with her 37 years.

“Her note… ‘Take care of your arm, and may crystal not march into your heart, little brother,’ she wrote. It seems so nonsensical compared to all the other notes they left me, but hers is a reminder of a threat I cannot keep from growing.”

The book they had gone to retrieve was almost unusable—it was soaked in blood, the pages all but hungrily drinking it all up as the Ironworks ran and prayed to all Twelve and Hydaelyn Herself that he would not bleed to death in the meanwhile.

The only readable parts had been shockingly relevant to their search.

Varis zos Galvus, while spearheading the Black Rose production, had not even been alive when the gas had been released.

Everything else had been unreadable.

Emet-Selch, much to his surprise, straightened up from his usual slouch. “Fascinating. How very, very fascinating. It seems that I quite underestimated how crafty you mortals can be. Or perhaps you merely are one of the craftiest around. No wonder I apparently took quite a liking to you and your skills—for which I cannot and will not apologise, nor anything else I have done. But, and this I say without a lick of irony, you are a lot more resilient than you look from the way you act. And likely just as ferocious to boot. You are very much a descendant worthy of Allag. Perhaps it is time we worked together rather than begrudgingly side by side, Exarch.”

With Ishgard’s request to help with the heretics and the eventual rise of Shiva being the next things to happen to them, they very much needed to work together. From here on out everything else would only get more complicated since the Ascians and their non-Ascian enemies knew they had to deal with a group of people rather than merely Meteor mostly on their own.

He very quietly offered Emet-Selch his non-crystalline hand. The Exarch was offering him a truce from his side—this Emet-Selch was not exactly the one who had lodged a bullet in his back and taken him to a fake Amaurot to wring as many answers out of him as possible. This Emet-Selch was very much the same man, but his thin patience had not entirely run itself ragged yet, meaning that this one had asked and presented theories rather than demanding answers.

With one of his usual crooked smiles, Emet-Selch shook the Exarch’s hand.


	32. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 6

The place was in utter disarray.

After splitting up just at the beginning of the Keeper of the Lake, the Crystal Exarch had been taken to the Crystal Tower by Emet-Selch. While not unusual for Emet-Selch to do whatever he damn well pleased, he would have been a good hand to have around right now.

Lahabrea, meanwhile, was forced to play more injured than he actually was.

Elidibus was surrounded by several Ascended and Fandaniel, who in turn was fumbling around with their words awkwardly. Something or other was going on with whosename and whatsit, contact with someone had been lost somesuch time ago. Those damned Sundered ever spoke up when they needed to speak up properly, and the sheer panic that was emanating off Fandaniel made him see red.

“Speak up, you blubbering fool,” Lahabrea eventually hissed from the dark corner he had parked himself in to pretend that he was still on the road to recovery, and Fandaniel near jumped out of their borrowed skin.

“S-Sir, yessir!” They took a deep breath, the equally nervous Ascended around them also relaxing slightly. “R-Right. It appears that Mitron has been s-slain.”

“Not unprecedented,” Elidibus said flatly. “Much as with Loghrif, we will simply find a mortal bearing his—“

Fandaniel shook their head furiously, their mask slipping ever so slightly. “The problems don’t stop there. D-Do you remember the… Th-Thirteenth?”

The other Ascended all looked into one direction _very_ nervously, and Lahabrea’s eyes also moved to see what precisely had these idiots worried. Unsurprisingly enough given the topic, most people present were staring straight at Igeyorhm.

She had paused for but a split second but the continued marching straight into his direction almost unbothered.

Fandaniel continued fretting and very rapidly started talking about how the swell of light on the First was worryingly reminiscent of the Flood of Darkness that Igeyorhm had caused on the lost shard. Elidibus, given his status as arguably from the future, clearly knew that this was nothing to worry about but played his role of the worried watcher expertly, dismissed outright ridiculous claims and calmed the borderline hysterical Fandaniel down. How far the mighty with the nerves of steel had fallen; before the Sundering this would have been delivered in Fandaniel’s normally droning and flat voice with their worries clearly voiced instead of this blubbering, muttering, skittish mess. They were perfectly fine, imposing even in he field when they did not feel watched by the Unsundered, but here they certainly became almost incomprehensible.

He was rudely ripped out of his thoughts by Igeyorhm marching over to him and forcing him to look up at her. He gave her the most dead-eyed stare he could manage—partially because he had to play his role, partially because he could not look at her with anything but contempt. Whatever worries she believed she had about his well-being right now, they were but the faintest echoes of what had once been. This Ascended was not his student from once upon a better time but just another broken soul that had been mangled beyond recognition by Hydaelyn.

“Good to know you yet live,” she hissed eventually and let go of his face. “It would have certainly been easier had you shown your damned face earlier, Lahabrea.”

“It would take more than a handful overenthusiastic Bringers of Light to even put more than a dent in me,” he drawled back.

“Says the evermighty Speaker, hunched over and clearly more delusional than ever,” another voice chimed in.

“Be quiet,” Igeyorhm immediately snarled, but Lahabrea raised a hand to silence both of them.

If the once enthusiastic but composed Igeyorhm had turned into a mortal with too much passion and no awareness of when a hard limit was reached, then the once steely determination to always be on top of his game and being the best version of himself Nabriales had turned into utter and complete selfish _sludge._ He, much like Gerun, had always had issues respecting his elders when it came to heated discussions, but this Ascended version of him was utterly and completely insufferable.

Though, perhaps, those traits had always been there and had merely intensified after the soul and its facets had bee spread thin.

In any case, Lahabrea took a deep breath and dropped his hand. “Cease your endless prattling, both of you. My state is of no concern to either of you as long as it does not impede our duties—and it does not. The Source is our concern, doubly so what with the First clearly in danger of tipping without the Source being primed quite yet. And besides, do you not have your own failed Primal to worry about, Nabriales?”

Shiva had been his duty, while Igeyorhm had been assigned to ensuring that what Eorzeans called beast tribes outside of the Warrior of Light’s reach summoned their deities. The Vanu Vanu and the Gnath deities Bismark and Ravana were clearly detectable in the aetheric atmosphere of the Source, two dual-aligned pinpricks that would soon start vacuuming up the surrounding aether. Water and wind as well as fire and earth were pairs of active and passive that would not grind one another to a screeching halt as well. Igeyorhm had certainly learned from her blunders with the Thirteenth—whereas Nabriales seemed to be grinding his teeth now.

“Your Lady Iceheart failed, but has she fallen?”

“No, she has not.”

“In that case, it will not be long before she will attempt to resummon her Primal to win over her fellow mortals in this pointless war. Have you gone to see if the dragon side of that war can be coaxed into summoning its own image of Ratatoskr yet, as once we did with Bahamut?”

“Who do you think I am—of course I have. The Dravanian Horde under Nidhogg remains blinded by his rage and therefore not receptive to any attempts of trickery no matter how subtle or full of violent promise.” Nabriales gestured vaguely, the irritation in his voice irritating Lahabrea as well. “If this war is to serve as our catalyst perhaps an approach to the city itself would be wiser.”

Igeyorhm cleared her throat. “The selfsame suggestion I have brought to the leadership there. While receptive, they claimed that to end an extraterrestrial like a dragon there will be needs for aether reserves more absurd a plain beast Primal. Perhaps not even the beast’s second eye stored on Azys Lla will suffice, he claimed. A… dangerous claim, to say the least.”

Elidibus’ droning voice echoed dully in the back of his head. How this plan would lead to Igeyorhm shattered in the same way that Nabriales would soon be shattered unless someone did some executive meddling. How Lahabrea, exhausted beyond his normal limits after attempting to force an Ardor to fix Mitron’s mess, was used as fuel for the furnace that would light the fires of a shade of Nidhogg and the Primal Shinryu.

He closed his eyes as he heard Elidibus order the lesser Ascended out, told Fandaniel to stop fidgeting and get Pashtarot to check aether transfer integrity between the First and the Source and then all but marched off to where he was supposed to be.

“A nonsensical claim,” he rasped and rolled his eyes at the other two. “The extraterrestrials operate on a similar base as a siphon mage. In a place as aetherially dense as Azys Lla thanks to the presence of other dragonspawn and Allagan chimeras, the untouched Eye alone should be enough to plunge the Source into enough chaos for the Ardor.”

“Siphon,” Nabriales muttered and crossed his arms. If the Warrior of Light’s claims had been correct then he had had his eyes on that infernal staff behind the Antecedent for quite a while, perhaps since the latest Calamity even. He shook his head and spoke up louder. “Was that all? I would quite like returning to my post.”

“Whatever,” Lahabrea said flatly and collapsed further into himself. “Do nothing to endanger our plans, for the glory of Our Lord.”

* * *

Igeyorhm had been thorough, if nothing else. Far gone were the days of her being one of the most energy-efficient creators in Amaurot, yes, but she had not repeated her previous failures in spectacular fashion. The beastmen were divided as they always were when it came to the summoning of Primals; a divide that was powerful enough that it apparently accelerated the appearance of those not connected to the Onemind. The Dravanian Forelands were a pale echo of what this region had once been despite it technically still being part of the Fae Coast on the same continent as Amaurot. Gone were the Fae, replaced with extraterrestrial dragons and beastmen who very likely were Hydaelyn’s idea of a sick joke. Rather than elaborate aetherial palaces there was this hive marring the countryside, and Lahabrea had to stop himself from grinding his teeth for a moment.

“Expertly done.” In the midst of this hive burned aether virulent enough to catch even his less than stellar sight easily, and slowly but steadily it would transform into a whorl that consumed the ambient aether around it until hunger would drive it further out than that. “I had not thought cracking the Onemind open to feed it the desire to summon their guardian possible at such a speed.”

Were this still Amaurot, were things as they should always have been, a proud smile would have passed her face before she composed herself to talk about the details.

Igeyorhm’s expression remained set, blank, with something darker mirrored in her eyes—despite being but a ghastly echo of what she had once been, her failure weighed heavy on her mind. “Our mistake was to try to make them conquerors. While still possible, at first they must needs be pressed about their own borders. A little trickery here and there did wonders and scared off the overarching mind into more drastic measures to defend its spawning grounds.”

Mindless beasts where once had been intelligence. While not native to this continent originally, the precursor—no, the true—version of these insects had been one of the countless people of the world when it was whole.

Thinking about it too much made his head hurt.

Something was constantly pressing against the edge of his awareness whenever he thought too much about how it had once been and should always have been.

* * *

“Something about your companion is deeply, unsettlingly wrong.”

Those had been the shinobi’s words when she had believed that Lahabrea was not listening to her talking to that Bringer of Light with the enormous slab of metal for a weapon. Oh, he knew. He didn’t give a damn. Igeyorhm had almost insisted on him resting more, Nabriales had scowled at him from afar—and Elidibus had defused the situation by staring at both of them and saying that Lahabrea was going to be put in the same place to rest as Emet-Selch had been.

Those Crystal Braves acted with about the grace of a rampaging rhino in a house made of fragile glass. How precisely anyone but the child with his head in the clouds could have missed the clearly discouraging, often plain antagonistic statements from the higher Braces was absolutely beyond Lahabrea, but he did not manage more than bland apathy. He didn’t care.

If he stopped for too long that chorus of agonised voices led by the former Elidibus would start demanding a blood tribute, or worse perhaps, would start telling the truth again.

This almost seemingly pointless brawl to retrieve a traitor to this place who called in her imperial allies was completely and utterly below him. Nevertheless, he had to play his role lest anything went awry. Perhaps worst of all, they were fighting alongside mortals that did not know. Therefore he had to pretend to be one of these absolutely worthless conjurers who had come out Amdapor’s grand failure. While not white magic it was clearly based on that, a simpler version that even simpletons could learn. It was stifling, plain annoying, and more of a hindrance than anything else.

He let his supposed allies know just how displeased he was in general with one very simple trick.

After one Garlean thought they had been clever by disarming the mage and failing to ram a weapon into any vital organs, Lahabrea merely closed his eyes and exhaled loudly. Mortal bodies were _such a bother._ He would have to pretend to faint from shock to his system once the supposed surge of adrenaline left, but since the soldier was busy shouting to his companions that the conjurer had been disarmed and wounded severely he also left himself open to attack.

Before anyone had a chance to quickly snipe that soldier from afar, Lahabrea raised his hands and put them on the man’s shoulders. Pulled him in and slammed his head into the soldier’s. It was a bafflingly primitive way of fighting but it dazed the soldier, whose helm had been lost earlier in the brawl. There was a gunblade stuck in his bloody body, and Lahabrea barely even felt that pain as he shoved the soldier to the ground and immediately started stomping on his neck with reckless abandon.

If the plan was to succeed, Emet-Selch and Elidibus would have to stay behind for a while while Nabriales’ burning curiosity about the Bringer of Light and the strange dimness of their light lured him out of his hiding space.

His sight was blurry as he heard wet cracking—a distant voice sounding vaguely like that infernal girl was begging him to stop since that soldier was already dead. He stomped three more times for good measure and then wordlessly ripped the weapon out of his side. Gods, he _hated_ being locked into a pointless body; he would have long abandoned it and slipped into another by this point but they were caught up in a play that rivalled the ones that Emet-Selch liked to put on, little overdramatic bastard that he was. He tossed the gunblade and pinned another soldier in the back with it before letting this stupid, stupid vessel collapse from shock.

* * *

Distant, distorted voices. Something or other about having stopped the bleeding. Nothing vital hit. Enough mages remained to knit that wound back together. There was one voice that was a little clearer than the rest—that infernal mortal whose fate was linked to Nabriales in this equation. Something or other about where the others had gone.

Then the ever familiar chorus of familiar but long-forgotten voices that may as well have become the static in his mind whenever he stopped for too long. It was torture being unable to leave that horrid fog as they closed this useless, useless body's wounds and then scattered to let him wake on his own terms.

When he opened his eyes again in that infernal gloom of this pointless, pointless place that morals called Thanalan and that had been turned into a bloody wasteland by imperial occupation, Elidibus was sitting beside him.

_“Good afternoon, Speaker.”_

_“If this is… a reprimand of some sort, boy… keep it to yourself.”_

Elidibus shook his head slightly. _“Not a reprimand, even though it burns under my tongue quite intensely. No, this is a question regarding what will be happening soon—Nabriales. Given that Emet-Selch and Igeyorhm as well as you and Nabriales were assigned the Source, I would trust your assessment, especially since Igeyorhm has since once more fallen under your control rather than Emet-Selch’s. While timeline integrity is key and some deaths unavoidable, the Warrior of Light asked a very important question while you were out cold: would Nabriales follow orders to stay his hands on the Source assuming that he survives his inevitable encounter with the Scions?”_

Lahabrea blinked blearily.

_“Emet-Selch believes that such will be the case. But in all honesty, I trust your judgement no matter how clouded it is more than his—especially on this case.”_

He stared at the ceiling. _“No. Were he not Sundered perhaps, but… no, he would not follow orders.”_

There was a very mortal hunger lurking underneath the Ascension. Something sinister that did not belong into the heart of an Amaurotine, something that had taken root due to how thin the soul was spread.

Or it had been there all along.

He still didn’t know. Truth be told, he had given up on that mystery after losing the Thirteenth. Whatever the explanation was, Nabriales was absolutely not going to follow orders based on a single, glaring fact that had not been that blatantly obvious back in Amaurot: an inferiority complex that made rational judgement of potential threats impossible if said threats were in the way of achieving greatness.

Lahabrea, fury burning in his chest, closed his eyes. If those adventurers and Elidibus were truly from the future—and he had no reason to doubt Gerun, no matter how flighty that child was—then he, too, would have fallen prey to something similar not too long after Nabriales.

 _“Not much longer now,”_ Elidibus said almost surprisingly softly when Lahabrea sat up to inspect his healed wound. _“Let us hope that this is the right choice.”_

_“Much like back then, I do not believe we have much of a choice in the matter. It is summon Zodiark or die horrendously—it is let this ascended piece of the Majestic’s soul perish or potentially turn every single Ascended against us because in his fury at being outdone he tells them that the Emissary, the Speaker and the Architect have allegedly abandoned the Ardor. Make your bed, lie in it. But I will not suffer for your folly.”_

Soon, the quiet would be interrupted by the Scion and the Ascended running in to screech about an Ascian in the Rising Stones.

Thank goodness—the chorus of dull, wailing voices in the back of his mind was starting to get annoying.


	33. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 7

“’Tis not the first time thou standeth before me, O Warrior of Light. Is that not so?”

For all intents and purposes the ascent to the top of the Keeper of the Lake to come face to face with Midgardsormr had been the same—if not much easier since Ryne was here as well.

“I sense the faintest trace of mine own essence on thee, Child of Hydaelyn.”

They had prepared a rousing speech for the Father of Dragonkind, but it seemed as if that was not required after all. They stared at the deceptively vacant-looking corpse of the greatest of all wyrms with an expression that they knew was very likely strangely melancholic from the way Ryne got closer to them in an attempt to comfort them.

“Thou art much too young and fleeting to have ever met with me prior to my fall. I ask of thee, Warrior of Light, Child of Hydaelyn—art thou mortal still, or hast thou embraced the arts of those that lurk in the shade?”

“The answer to both those questions is no. I am not mortal, but I am not under the dark ones’ thrall either.”

A long, thoughtful silence fell over the solemn uppermost part of what had once been a great wyrm and a Garlean warship of untold proportions. Crystallised aether, both corrupted from the Calamity and merely dry dragon blood, glimmered in the afternoon sun alongside the metal of their armour and Ryne’s daggers.

“Thou art not of this world—art thou even of this time?”

“Of this world, not of its time. It is my companion who is not of this world and not of this time.”

The last confession of Midgardsormr was that he had been aware of the split nature of this star all along. After all, dragons sensed differences in aether, and though the shards were divided by a void in between them, the aether was still plainly visible to him. A deal with Hydaelyn to keep the nature of this star secret from its inhabitants in exchange for a safe place for him and his children. It was a vow that dragons did not consciously know about but that they upheld by virtue of the pact. The only one who had ever gotten remotely close to telling a mortal the truth of their world had been Ratatoskr, and she had paid the ultimate price for her blunder.

He had broken that vow of silence not too long before it all went upside down—perhaps Midgardsormr had sensed the end of this star and its reflections and wished to impart that knowledge to someone who could work with it.

“Once upon a time, the challenge you wish to give to me was conquered. And when the time came to deal with the no longer dormant evil that hunted you even to this star, we fought together. I owe my life to you in more ways than one, O Father of Dragons, but the debt was repaid by seeing Omega defeated with my own hands. But… I am not here to demand you acknowledge that. I invite you to test my strength, my partner’s strength. The Mother’s eyes do not reach everywhere, after all.”

For the sake of temporal integrity, some things needed to stay the same. While they did not wish anything of the sort onto Ryne, the lack of a Blessing of Light was what inevitably sent Nabriales into the Rising Stones.

“Is this thine desire, child? Thine earnest desire?”

“This part of a world we call home is in grave danger otherwise. Whether it is my desire or not is irrelevant.”

“Bold, brave words. But not delivered without merit, ‘twould seem. Come, then, and test thine mettle ‘gainst the missing light!”

* * *

Moenbryda had been one of their many teachers in more than one sense. Applied plainly, quite a lot of their weapon twirls had been something that Moenbryda had taught them in between all the chaos that slowly but steadily unfurled around the Scions at the time. Her almost overwhelmingly positive outlook had also affected them, to a point that even G’raha back then had commented on them being unusually cheerful whenever their feet carried them to Saint Coinach’s Find for a few days of helping him go through book after book.

So much time had passed, however, that they had forgotten quite a few of her glaringly obvious quirks. Her voice was loud and cheerful even when talking about her field of study, yet somehow she also managed to sound _coherent_ talking about any of that stuff. It reminded them of how the people at the Facet had drawn them in and slowly explained the crafts to them, though some had been less successful than others. The more specific words one used, the less likely Meteor had always been to understand; it was part of the reason why they and Alisaie got along so smashingly. While certainly not stupid they were not an academic genius.

Moenbryda understood that and made a wholehearted attempt at explaining what she was doing with the White Auracite to them and Ryne while the Ascians had stayed behind at the Ceruleum Processing Plant for rather obvious reasons. For one, Lahabrea had still been unconscious. Elidibus, ever skilled in faking emotions that he clearly did not have, had said that he was worried about his fellow adventurer waking up alone and confused which might not only endanger him but also the surrounding people. Emet-Selch on the other hand was Emet-Selch and therefore did whatever he wanted to do.

“You guys most certainly are the liveliest bunch at the Rising Stones whenever you’re in. A riot, some would even call you.”

Meteor rolled their eyes with a small smile. “Just call Speaker a creep and be done with it, Moenbryda.”

“Well, yes. He certainly is a creep. But once you get past all that ire and ill temperament, he’s surprisingly literate and intelligent for a guy who has no qualms about stomping a neck into a bloody pulp and then manages to pin a person with a weapon that had been embedded in his own body not moments ago. Seriously, hearing that story was bewildering to say the least, and I do have one burning question before I begin my experiment: is it a requirement for adventurers to be sort of unhinged?”

They snorted and leaned against a piece of rock. Ryne and the Exarch exchanged an almost worried glance for a moment before Meteor shook their head.

“If you want to survive long enough, I suppose you do have to be sort of unhinged. That, or extremely lucky.”

Moenbryda laughed. “That’s very fair. Good thing he is that unhinged—I would love to hear his opinion on the White Auracite once we return to the Rising Stones and I get a chance to get dear Urianger to help me increase its capabilities some more.”

Unfortunately for them, a cold prick in the surrounding aether that the Echo told them about meant that they were already being watched by Nabriales. Ryne also bristled slightly, her Echo warning her as well. The Exarch remained unwarned but he turned his ears slightly into their direction to signal that he knew something was up without alerting Moenbryda right away. Alas, much like back when this had first played out with only them around, Moenbryda very quickly picked up on how tense they were and tilted her head.

“Is everything quite alright, Meteor, Oracle, Exarch? You three seem tense.”

Meteor pushed themself off the rock they were leaning against and glared directly at where the strange power seemed to emanate from.

It had not been the first time their Echo had warned them of an Ascian threat, of course. Over time they felt more and more watched by some unseen source; first it had started with the aftermath of the golem that had brought them to the chain of events that saw them off as envoy. Many times something cold pricked them in the side to warn them but by the time they turned to look the presence had vanished—the sole exception to that had been the instance in the Waking Sands following their return from the Black Shroud and once more departing to learn more about the Scion’s mystery quarry Lahabrea. As they learned several tragedies later, the reason for that had been Lahabrea’s presence in the Waking Sands as the malevolent entity controlling the unusually exhausted and quiet Thancred. Hindsight, and all that. Even the reappearances of Primals were accompanied by that cold, cold prickling on their skin.

Nabriales however, given his status as a higher-up, had no qualms about revealing himself. After all, what good could one Warrior of Light—or many—do without sufficient amounts of readily accessible aether? Not even an Unsundered could withstand the blunt force of more energy than mortals were ever meant to wield. But right now, no readily available energy was here, unless the people of Eorzea had learned how to siphon energy out of corrupted crystals without machinery.

Which, of course, was not the case. “Well, it would seem I have been spotted.”

Despite there being two more people, the exchange played out almost entirely as they remembered it, which raised a different question altogether: how come Lahabrea had reacted to drastically different while most other people merely seemed to shrug at there being more than one Warrior of Light? They had been a one-person-army for Eorzea and Hydaelyn, had gained the fame of being undefeatable if not through skill then through utter persistence. The only one who had ever gotten truly close to killing them had been _Elidibus,_ and that only because the Exarch made his plea for help in the wrong moment.

And while Nabriales cheerfully pointed out that it appeared that the Blessing of Light had been stripped from them, leaving him access to the Rising Stones, they came to the horrifying question of those truly relevant to the timeline having different reactions to people.

While they ran back to the Processing Plant to warn the other three they wondered if a lack of proper reaction or no change meant that the person in question was irrelevant or their fate was set in stone. The fact that Haurchefant had not even so much as _blinked_ at several adventurers romping through Camp Dragonhead before they revealed that they were investigating Francel’s case had already worried them, but his complete lack of change right down to his reaction to Shiva and their merry little group confronting her without the Temple Knights had quite left a bad taste in their mouth.

* * *

If nothing else, they could appreciate Lahabrea’s attempts at appearing like a conjurer. But even from right next to the aetherial tear they saw that his hands were shaking slightly and his face was contorted in either plain disgust or utter, seething exhaustion. While the healers had patched him up nice and quick to save his body’s life, there had to be lingering effects that weakened him. As such, unable to draw upon anything living nearby without seriously compromising their mission, the glow in his hands quickly fizzled out over and over while his expression remained stoically, painfully focused.

“Forget about me… go after him!” Moenbryda kept a hand pressed to her wound, her face contorted in pain. “Minfilia… save Minfilia and stop worrying about me! I’ll be fine… she won’t be if you dont _go!”_

They quickly nodded at the others to varying amounts of success. Emet-Selch in particular had his brows furrowed as he seemed to evaluate something—considering that he thought mortals incredibly selfish he was likely trying to figure out what was going on in the mortally wounded Moenbryda’s head. Of all people present however, Ryne hesitated the most.

In fact, she stepped back from the aetherial tear that was rapidly contracting. “You go. I will stay and help Moenbryda; you six can manage on your own.”

“I’ll be _fine,_ Oracle—Minfilia needs you more than I would!”

Meteor slowly shook their head at Ryne. Despite all her cheer and bright optimism, Moenbryda was an incredibly proud person who would not admit she needed help in that very moment. But as proud as she was, she had a point.

Thus it was all seven of them who entered the Chrysalis.

Elidibus exhaled loudly, his ears flat against his head. It seemed there was another puzzle piece that he had missed until this very moment, or perhaps it was plain anger at the choice of location. He was exceedingly hard to read despite the fact it appeared as if his blank outer shell had been cracked little by little with every failure, his greatest victory and his bitterest loss and the subsequent little victories along the way.

Almost too late they realised that Nabriales, no matter his intentions, would very likely recognise his fellow Ascians and call them out for it. While Gaius had most certainly not heard a thing, Minfilia would be able to hear any sort of conversation just fine.

They would have to attack before he even had the chance to properly gloat without endangering poor Minfilia. It seemed as if the others had the same idea—the Ascians in particular stuck their heads together and urgently whispered something in what appeared to be Amaurotine, judging by the Exarch’s baffled expression.

Before they could ask what exactly was going on here, Minfilia made a noise. A small groan, just enough to make every hair on their body rise. She was not someone who fought well or at all, and while fully capable of withstanding torture she absolutely should never had to go through anything like that ever again after being freed from Castrum Centri. Even moreso knowing the fate that still awaited her and that was likely impossible to avert.

_“Absolutely not,”_ came a hiss from Emet-Selch. _“This is insane, Elidibus.”_

_“If you have a better suggestion, by all means, be our guest. I shall thoroughly enjoy watching you squirm as you struggle to find a solution and eventually arrive at the same conclusion, however,”_ Lahabrea said almost eerily calmly and then cracked a wide grin.

_“Stop antagonising one another—it is insane, yes, but as Lahabrea said in too many words, we do not exactly have a choice for an alternative without compromising our mission.”_

A small sigh. _“Mark my words, this will have a reckoning none of us will quite enjoy.”_

They opened their mouth to ask what exactly they were talking about. 

But just as before, something interrupted them. It was a familiar noise; a rumble that sounded as if something was being drawn out of the ground, and they turned their head to look at Minfilia. She had her eyes closed in this one crucial moment, and they almost barked out a laugh as a glaringly bright red sigil flashed in front of Emet-Selch’s face. It certainly prompted Nabriales to appear, a furious glint in his eyes as the dark wisps of his portal all but twisted and grew longer. It looked like tendrils that flickered and twisted about for a moment, but as they tore their gaze away from that spectacle behind Nabriales to look at their companions, they noticed that Elidibus’ sigil had also flared up. The rumbling grew more and more intense as Emet-Selch’s breathing slowed to near nothing and Elidibus stretched one hand out as if to reach for the portal somehow still behind Nabriales. 

Ryne backed away slightly, her eyes wide but _very_ much unfocused. Whatever she was seeing it must not have been particularly pretty to behold. 

Their Echo was all but _screaming_ at them to run from whatever umbral tempest was about to be let loose. 

Then Emet-Selch snapped, Elidibus closed his stretched-out hand, and Lahabrea’s own sigil flickered into being. 

Bluntly put, it felt as if someone had dropped them into the Rift all over again, the same Rift they had perceived as they clung to Alpha and tried not to think about this vast, vast empty space, as they heard the countless voices of people they had once known all at the same time. They _knew_ such a thing was not possible, even if the sheer aetheric pressure in that one, blunt slam made their own body feel unreal. No, they were still in the Chrysalis—there was just enough of a jagged crystal they saw for a split moment before it all went as utterly, seethingly dark as it had grown when Hades had freed himself from his own body. 

Unsurprisingly enough, they caught a glimpse of claws too long for the hands they were on. Dangerous glinting steel while the aether churned and twisted, turned and whirled about the place. They had _seen_ Amaurotine sorcery, they had stood against this relentless tide of all-consuming darkness. Ryne and the Exarch had seen it as well—the Exarch had slung his arms around the terrified Ryne, had pulled her face into his chest and all but covered her eyes that way even if it very likely did not do much. 

But rather than mere darkness this time around, something pulsed in that dark that most certainly did not belong. There were wisps, brighter than the dark that Emet-Selch clearly called forth from the Lifestream. A dark grey that somehow stood stark against the utter black all around them. It muffled all sound—someone was shouting but they barely even made out words. It moved along the darkness despite its source clearly being far from whoever commandeered it in this very moment. 

And then Lahabrea clapped his hands together. 

It all collapsed into itself, a similar deluge that Emet-Selch had tried to raise against them, but this time the waves were not trying to drown them. No, whatever aetheric horror the Ascians had raised there, it seemed as if Lahabrea was drawing it away from Nabriales. 

It could not have lasted more than a moment, but Nabriales collapsed the moment Lahabrea dropped his arms again. The binds holding Minfilia were undone, and Meteor looked at their companions for a moment, then nodded at the Exarch and sprinted past the Ascian who was on his knees with his hands grasping at his chest. Not another word escaped him as he came apart, and by the heavens they had more questions than ever before. But none of that mattered as they skirted to an abrupt halt and dropped to their own knees to check on Minfilia. 

She was unconscious this time around—they distinctly remembered her weakly whispering a word of thanks and following them once they had helped her stand. They worriedly checked her pulse, though much to their relief her heart was beating just fine and her breath was steady. She had simply passed out for some reason or another, and they had a feeling that whatever Lahabrea had done had something to do with that. Quickly they gathered her in their arms and turned back around. 

Just in time, apparently, for aforementioned Lahabrea to stagger backwards. 

“I… understand now. I understand,” he rasped as he looked at them from across the Chrysalis—then his eyes rolled back and the only thing keeping him from collapsing was Emet-Selch catching him.

“Out, now,” Emet-Selch mouthed at them from afar, and while they all that their differences they could very much agree to _that_ at the very least.

Of course, out meant that they tumbled out of a small remainder of the aetherial rift that had seen them all in, and they quickly put Minfilia down in a corner under Moenbryda’s agonised but watchful gaze. Her eyes narrowed in surprise when Emet-Selch followed suit and put Lahabrea down—a thin line of blood rolled out of the unconscious Ascian’s mouth and they only just noticed that somehow, through all of this, Lahabrea had managed to undo quite a lot of the magic that had stitched his wound back together again. 

They did not have time to ask about _that,_ naturally, as an understandably furious Nabriales materialised. Thankfully it seemed as if they weren’t the only person interrupted before they could even speak—it was again Emet-Selch who prevented someone from saying a word by sighing loudly and closing his eyes. 

“Ah, deary me. It would seem that my disguise is about to fail me.” All eyes turned to him, no small amount of stark horror in the Exarch’s eyes as Emet-Selch shoved his firearm into its holster.

His disguise as ‘Architect’ had always given off the same sort of energy that any other Garlean defector gave off. For some absurd reason, however, his frankly nonsensical choice of fighting gear had, after the demise of the Ultima Weapon, started to include a book holster on the opposite side of his firearm one. He all but ripped that book out of there now, flipped it open—and Meteor wished they could have throttled the Ascian to death right then and there. 

For a moment runes danced through the air, and what must have been a strange Carbuncle they couldn’t see properly flung itself at Nabriales to keep him from speaking in the altogether. 

“Mistress Moenbryda, if you would be so kind! Your prototype, _now!”_

* * *

They did get an answer to a question that had arisen, however. 

Combined, their energies shattered the White Auracite that violently vibrated—and Moenbryda had breathed out a “thank the Twelve” and collapsed. 

Alerted by the sudden noise, Y’shtola and Thancred had rushed in just in time to see the shattered Auracite, Minfilia stirring slightly in the corner, and Moenbryda lying in a pool of her own blood. Lahabrea, too, had slid to the side and now lay on the floor, the blood on his face dry and the reopened wound merely bleeding sluggishly instead of horrendously. 

They hurriedly called for assistance to get conjurers in here to help Moenbryda and Speaker, and the rest were banished from the Solar. Minfilia merely meekly asked what had happened in the Chrysalis because somehow her eyes had closed on her own and then all had gone dark and silent. Ryne very gently said that she may have merely passed out just as the Ascian appeared once more. 

Then Thancred turned to Emet-Selch, who snapped the book he was holding shut. 

“Well then, now to you Architect. It would appear that you have been lying to us.”

Emet-Selch smiled softly but very dangerously. The other Scions in the room were all on edge because a person clearly of Garlean heritage had just revealed that he was capable of conjury. “I did, yes. But would you have believed me to be very much of the same stock as young Arenvald? Certainly not. Could I have hidden the third eye like Master Garlond does? Certainly—but then you would be accusing me of the selfsame things the _moment_ that disguise fails. Yes, the profession was a lie—the rest was the truth as my companions can verify.” 

All eyes turned onto the other adventurers, with one notable exception; Arenvald was staring directly at Emet-Selch with no small amount of admiration glimmering in his eyes. 

The Exarch and Elidibus both simultaneously confirmed that he was saying the truth. 

“It would explain Mhitra’s recent reports of finding several soulstones and one student granted one conjuring up a strange egi,” Y’shtola said as she exited the Solar. “That was you, was it not? The aetheric signature was rather alike to a certain Primal that only three people faced recently.” Then she let out a heavy sigh. “May I ask the adventurers, the Antecedent and Thancred to come to the Solar with me? Anyone else and this place may become too cramped."

The group dispersed, urgent muttering going through the Rising Stones. Dread settled in the pit of their stomach as they pushed in, and Y’shtola dismissed the cluster of Mor Dhonan conjurers called in to save Moenbryda and Lahabrea. 

Only once the last one was gone did Y’shtola lower her head slightly and shook it. “Both injuries were too significant to save both of them. Moenbryda had lost too much blood and was slipping from us, Speaker’s body was completely shutting down due to repeat traumatic injury to his system occurring too rapidly for it to truly recover despite the wound having been closed, we presume. Our choice, however, was made for us by Moenbryda—she was still conscious, barely so, while Speaker did not respond outside of shallow breaths. Between one scholar and one saviour of Eorzea, we ought to save the saviour was what she said. Whether it was an order or a request we do not know, but such… such was her choice.” 

They had wondered if the events leading up to certain things not changing meant that it was an inevitable outcome. Their own fate and the Eighth Calamity had not been an inevitable outcome according to the Exarch, and Lahabrea and Emet-Selch’s demises were not inevitable either. 

Moenbryda and Nabriales, however…. 

Minfilia sunk to her knees with a wretched sob escaping her, and both Ryne and Thancred immediately put a hand on each of her shoulders. 

“Speaker is stable but should under _no circumstances_ do more than _walk_ any time soon, and even that will almost be too much. I have _never_ seen someone so aetherially drained and weak and _still_ draw breath. I will _not_ allow Moenbryda’s sacrifice to go to waste,” Y’shtola said, her tone flat and dangerous as she glowered at the adventurers standing in an awkward cluster.

All four of them—the Exarch, Meteor, Emet-Selch and Elidibus—nodded mutely. 


	34. ACT IV: Under Dark Crystal's Wings, Part 8

“Run that by me again,” the Warrior of Light said with such a banally deadpan tone that for a moment he swore he saw their soul flare bright blue instead of their normally more mute blue.

A trick of the light, one could have easily argued but there was no denying the shade was the same. Elidibus had even said that much with a dry smile on his face back in Garlemald—it certainly was not unusual to run into shards of people he had once known, but now that he thought about it this one’s similarity to Alexis had never been as pronounced as it was with this Warrior of Light.

“Again,” he deadpanned back. “For the seventh time?”

“I am not a mage, Emet-Selch. Especially not an Amaurotine mage. Sorcerer. Whatever. Keep it as simple as you can, I implore you.”

He rolled his eyes and tapped the wall he was leaning against once, twice, three times.

“I am running out of metaphors to simplify this, dear hero. But very well. Imagine we constructed three Crystal Towers. One draws its energy from the sun, much like this one does. Another draws it from the moon. And the other from the stars. All celestial bodies, yes? But of course the sun’s power, ha, outshines that of the moon and the stars. Consider that the three energy levels in play here; with me as the sun tower, Elidibus as the moon tower and Lahabrea as the star tower. Creation magic of any of the three main schools operates on what source we claim that energy from—my sorcery draws from what you call the Lifestream, Elidibus is what is called an ambient siphoner and draws his from surrounding soulless aether, and Lahabrea is a phantomologist who draws his from soul-bearing clusters of aether which you call sentient beings. Now, the key difference here is that neither I nor Elidibus ever branched out into the other schools of magic—Lahabrea has not only merely looked into them but mastered the fundamentals of all of them.”

The Warrior of Light nodded at him, their expression as infuriatingly blank as ever.

Emet-Selch sighed vaguely and shrugged helplessly. “I am exceedingly powerful and can quite literally brute-force a lot. Elidibus compensates for his low power levels with an astounding amount of raw control. Lahabrea is the perfect middle ground in his proper field and much the same as Elidibus on the others. Now, united Elidibus and I smacked the blunt sides of our comically oversized greatswords onto Nabriales, while Lahabrea went and drew all that power to him, then smashed it on the ground like a rabid cook would do if left alone with an ungrateful lord’s favourite porcelain. Despite his control, mortal bodies are certainly not made for _that_ particular sort of trick, and thus he undid recent magic weaving his flesh back together. After all, it was aether used for magic as well. Through wounds even incorporeal aether can start flaking off if doing that particular stunt, and given how he undersold his true exhaustion and us failing to notice it entirely, it comes as little surprise that he collapsed and, in mortal eyes, all but came too close to wandering into the river you call Lifestream.”

He put his hands together when the Warrior of Light let out some sort of affirmative grunt. 

“Having to put up an appearance of being _mortal,_ of course, Lahabrea stayed inside a body that likely felt as if it was tearing itself apart. And while any attempts at fixing it are appreciated, your conjurer friend has one thing right: he will need an excessive amount of proper rest to restore enough aether. Given what I understand of the timeline you and Elidibus hail from, Lahabrea went into this state somehow before being attacked by a man bearing a dragon eye thanks to his and Igeyorhm’s machinations. How precisely did you get Lahabrea to accidentally tear part of his soul?”

Elidibus had vaguely answered that question with a very thoughtful expression by quietly admitting that while he had seen a concentrated energy surge on Azys Lla so umbrally charged that it could only have been phantomology of some sort, he had not seen it in detail due to holding his position. With Lahabrea and Igeyorhm involved there were many things that could have happened; too many in fact. Lahabrea had not been given the title of prodigy phantomologist before he was even remotely considered old enough to study the field for nothing; just the same way that Hythlodaeus had always been called clairvoyant behind his back due to his shocking ability to predict the future before anyone realised that he was in fact clairvoyant. And Igeyorhm, sundered though she may have been in that very moment, was still a part of what had once been the only person to ever come vaguely close to rivalling Lahabrea at the same age. 

The only person who knew the detail of whatever had happened in that future at that very precise moment was this Warrior of Light who tilted their head slightly and narrowed their shockingly bright blue eyes. 

“I have no idea what _precisely_ happened. Something or other about him becoming her and her becoming him and suddenly there was—“

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on there, hero.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You cannot in all honesty be suggesting that Lahabrea and Igeyorhm underwent a prime fusion.”

“I wouldn’t even know what on good earth a _prime fusion_ is,” they said, once more shockingly deadpan. “All I know is it looked weird, tossed both their elements at me, spoke with both their voices at once, and fell apart like a house made of playing cards once I beat it around enough.”

“Unbelievable. For a prime fusion to be undone by a _cold, hard bludgeoning until it broke apart._ But that would most certainly explain how you achieved a soul tear effect on Lahabrea which would have left him prone to anything aether absorbing like a dragon eye. Truly, and I mean that with all sincerity I can muster, _astounding._ In any case, our already exhausted Speaker in an effort to keep Nabriales’ mouth shut, displayed why many people would consider him the best creator and general mage in all of Amaurot. My objection, as you asked before, was the fear of soul tearing—and as you likely heard, my concerns were dismissed before I ever got to voice them properly. He needs rest, but do you at the very least have a better understanding of what caused this state?”

They scowled at him. “No thanks to your previous six attempts, but I think I understand now. This is all very needlessly complicated.” 

He waved a hand through the air. “It certainly would not be complicated were you still in possession of your whole self, hero. Incorporeal, ambient and corporeal were ever the three schools of creation, and Lahabrea and Igeyorhm were effectively the top of the crop in all things corporeal.”

The Warrior of Light rolled their eyes at him, and Emet-Selch had to blink for a moment to banish the vision of Alexis, maskless, sitting with Hythlodaeus at the table and pointing a fork at him before going on a rant about how not being told about important, life-changing for all of them events was _exceedingly_ rude. A rant they topped off with a roll of the eyes that made Hythlodaeus snort before cheerfully chiming up that he _had_ warned the new Emet-Selch. 

It was mildly surreal to know that Alexis, ever plain and proudly boring Alexis, who had somehow become one of Hydaelyn’s countless toy soldiers lining up and trying to topple the playing board.

Alexis, who certainly followed theoretical discussions better than the Warrior of Light—a person who refused a violent approach until something snapped in their head thanks to whatever they had witnessed in that hellhole Amaurot became.

He sighed once again and shook his head slightly.

* * *

The Dragonsong War had been a series of very subtle and utterly blatant machinations woven together. The dragons were something that was not that easy to deal with on the Source but _only_ on the Source. While they lived in harmony with the Elezen of Ishgard, there was a clear envy from the very mortal Elezen based on their souls knowing that they, too, ought to know eternity on the same scale as these dragons. Thus it was easy enough to stoke that envy into blatant blind desire—all they ever did was accelerate processes already in motion. Mortals were inherently corrupt and wished ill upon those better off than them, and the better off rarely if ever considered the needs of the lesser. 

The Dragonsong War’s true origins had been obscured by the Ishgardian church leadership from the very beginning—history was passed down as if the Wyrm Nidhogg had attacked first and not out of blind rage over the butchering of his beloved sister. The Wyrm Ratatoskr had been a thorn in the Ascian’s side due to her inherently curious nature; if she had been permitted to continue for much longer her curiosity might have driven her to find them. Dragons were like bloodhounds when it came to following their own desires, had she ever desired to know about the mysterious shadows in the dark there would have been no peace for any of them until she was slain.

Part of _Lahabrea,_ of all people, had opposed that plan for a split second—he was and would always remain a researcher at the very fundaments of his person. Dragons as an alien species were an unknown factor that he could still very easily learn about if he so desired, but after that moment passed he agreed that perhaps it was time to set another game up, this time involving the dragons that remained in Dravania and the Elezen whose souls yearned for their taken eternity. 

Seeing what was quite literally the one battle that would start to shift it towards an eventual brittle but mutual peace following the ultimate demise of Nidhogg and the Ishgardian Orthodox Church was… fascinating, to say the least. For all their failure to be subtle about anything at all, those mortals stuck in their supposedly eternal war had not quite lost their hope to win yet. War propaganda was one hell of a drug, as Hythlodaeus would have said dryly with his smile completely and utterly dead on his face, but even Emet-Selch had to agree with that ghost vision of a person he once knew and now no longer did. Despite all of that, it genuinely seemed as if there were people who believed in that man in blue.

Mortals so very rarely did something because they believed in one person. He had already nearly broken into hideous laughter when he saw the lost Junius sister whom many in Garlemald had considered killed in action as the left-hand woman of that Ishgardian man in blue whose name kept escaping him. Seeing that now, in a frankly ridiculous hour, people still rallied to the blue man’s calls to defend the Steps of Faith was _ridiculous._ He wasn’t even that talented a speaker compared to, say, the very extremely grouchy Lahabrea who was standing far away from the group that would soon depart to defend this bridge. 

“Ah, Lord Haurchefant!” The Warrior of Light’s voice was surprisingly lacking its usual rough edge. “Thank you again for so very kindly offering to take care of Speaker—the cold air might do wonders with his wounds.”

The Ishgardian grinned from one ear to the other as he insisted that this was the least he could do, considering that ‘Speaker’ had been directly involved with driving back Iceheart’s forces for the first time. Lahabrea, meanwhile, looked as if someone had force-fed him a venomous snake, but he did not put up a fight when that same Haurchefant offered to help him into a Chocobo’s saddle so he could comply with the harsh demands of as little walking as possible by Archon Y’shtola. It was all part of the disguise, they had all implored, and the injured Speaker would make an easy target for the Crystal Braves. 

Thus they had taken him along and asked Lord Haurchefant to take care of him for a while, citing him needing rest and the cold suiting his recovery better than any other climate—without telling a single soul about it. Their answer if a Scion or Brave asked would be that they had taken him to people he knew from before the Calamity who also understood how severe his injuries truly had been. Lord Haurchefant had in fact been informed of Lahabrea technically being under a strict as little strain as possible rule, and the man had cheerfully said that he would keep an eye on the adventurer. Ishgard owed much more than that to them already after all.

It was bizarre knowing that there were mortals who at least had some semblance of love for their common man despite there clearly being a lot of glory to be won in combat here. No, this man seemed perfectly content leading a Chocobo with a pale, hunched over adventurer in its saddle along the road back to Camp Dragonhead.

* * *

Meteor all but vanished after the Steps of Faith, quickly excusing themself and claiming there was something they absolutely needed to do. Knowing the timeline there was something that they were likely dealing with, and he very quickly pinpointed there was only one thing they could be doing—they were making certain that the Ala Mhigan boy did not fall over the wrong piece of information, or if he had already, that he would be taken somewhere safe. Indeed, when they returned he smelled blood on them but their expression was rather content.

The Exarch was clearly worried about them, all too gently making certain that none of the blood he also smelled was theirs. There was this overfamiliar gentleness that he had not truly seen since before the fall of Amaurot in those motions that it made him feel _sick._

At the very least the hero’s conscience seemed to be clear.

Until it wasn’t.

They had lamented the death of Moenbryda quite a lot, but then, when asked about it by Ryne, very quickly said that they had gone to ensure that Wilred was _nowhere_ near anything dangerous. Hells, the bodies they fished from Urth’s Fount were likely the very Crystal Braves that would have killed the boy before. The Braves immediately voiced a concern that the boy was still missing but his companions had been found dead—the Scion Yda who was not Yda very loudly protested the claim that the boy could have killed them. She was joined by the Warrior of Light also saying that the boy would never do such a thing, but the chaos had been sown and their conscience received its first crack. 

Whatever their goal had been here, it was clear that they were nearing a breaking point of some sort. The Scion Moenbryda had been a heavy loss that affected general Scion morale, and Emet-Selch truly wondered how or why these Scions had ever proven to be the most dangerous mortals about if that was how they handled loss. Elidibus vanished on occasion without warning, and when pressed about it merely commented on the timeline integrity being required to some part. There was a distinct aura of light aether about him at times and others it appeared as if he had been in the arid climes of either Thanalan or Gyr Abania as these lands were called now.

He had always been content with merely sitting back and watching, but watching this was most certainly not as amusing or interesting as he believed it would be.

A conversation with the Antecedent Minfilia, and Meteor exited into the empty other than the adventurers Rising Stones. They turned a corner, stared at the wall, then buried their face in their hands and sunk to their knees. The Exarch was beside them immediately as they started to all but cry that they could not do this again knowing that Minfilia was the next on the list of victims of fate.

Another shocking similarity to their true self—Hythlodaeus and Alexis often got into friendly but animated verbal matches over whether fate existed or not. Alexis was of the belief that it did and there was no outrunning it no matter how hard they tried; Hythlodaeus usually said that the future was not set in stone and however that ‘fate’ manifested depended on too many variables to truly be a thing. Neither of them ever changed their opinion on it but they always listened to the other side with an almost bemused smile whenever something happened that supported their belief. 

The Crystal Braves in the meanwhile started acting stranger and stranger, and Emet-Selch in particular noticed that their supposed captain behaved the oddest of all. How anyone could have missed that was beyond him, but then again mortals were not the most perceptive creatures around.

It wasn’t until Thancred moodily commented that he almost missed the horrible cloud of anger that was Speaker that Meteor’s conscience cracked. After all, the man that the Scion claimed to almost miss was the selfsame Ascian who had, as Thancred had admitted not too long ago after too many a glass of wine following Moenbryda’s death, all but mentally tortured him for an age and a half and then violently shut him out when the situation in the Praetorium came to a head.

It seemed as if they were a completely different person in that moment—someone who, in an eerie way, reminded him of their missing Fourteenth. But rather than completely going blank and preaching something, they let in the sheer horror of their duty for a moment.

Hydaelyn had some rather interesting ideas about who made a good fighter.

Then again She never _chose_ Her tools of war directly. She but called them all in, and when one showed more promise than the rest of the rabble that died quickly and pointlessly, She put them through all hells and back just to impede progress by opponents that could not be killed easily. 

It would have been fascinating had it not been almost comically disgusting at the same time.

* * *

Given that they were seen as their merry little group’s leader, Meteor was requested to speak privately with the Sultana. This was the first card falling that would bring the rest of its house down with it, but Emet-Selch had almost wanted to enjoy the show as key player. Alas, it was the Oracle who was pulled into a rousing conversation between the Ishgardian Lord Aymeric—as he now remembered his name—by Minfilia. Elidibus and the Exarch were busy speaking with that Ala Mhigan serving Ul’dah, Raubahn.

Having had his fair share of events like these, Emet-Selch kept to the less populated parts of the room after shooing off an insistent Yda that he ought to socialise at least a little bit rather than step in for the missing Speaker as the Scion’s most moody bastard. He had already found no joy in that colourless mess as Emperor Solus, he was most certainly not going to find any joy in it as Adventurer Architect.

He stood there for several minutes, ignored by the rest of the people—until someone shoved a small glass into his ground-locked view.

“Why am I not surprised?” He took the glass but made a point in not drinking whatever was in it.

“My, it sounds like you want me gone.”

“Perhaps I do want you gone. You would not even know unless I told you.”

“I believe I have quite a fair understanding of when and how you want me gone, differences or not. Unless, of course, you mean ‘gone’ in the sense often used with ‘dead and’—in which case I would have to _politely_ refuse.”

He narrowed his eyes but refused to look sideways. “Sticking your nose where it does not belong, then?”

“It belongs into _this_ particular situation more than yours does, believe it or not. Besides, you more than any other ought to know that observation unfortunately often requires putting oneself into the same situation as the object one wishes to observe.”

Emet-Selch only rolled his eyes. “Deliver your cryptic warning already and see that you stay out of my sight, lest I say something I would have regretted in the past.”

A long, drawn-out sigh. “And if I have no cryptic warning and merely approached you for want of company, Hades? What then?”

“And you would have me believe _that,_ Hythlodaeus?”

Finally he threw a glance to the side—leaning against the wall beside him was indeed the missing Fourteenth, in the same mortal disguise he had been in when the Ultima Weapon had but recently been vanquished, and if the Warrior of Light was to be believed, had been in even longer. It was similar enough to what he had looked like in Amaurot, eerily so almost—the only difference was that his hair was somehow longer than it had ever been back in better days.

His red eyes were clearly focused this time around, and his gaze was following someone through the room—unfortunately it appeared to merely be someone carrying a tray of empty glasses and nothing of real interest.

“Once upon a time, you would have believed it,” he said very softly and crossed his arms. “I have no cryptic warning. I came here merely to observe, and perhaps to exchange but a few words with a familiar soul. Your path is clear to both you and your companions, even if you believe it obscured by hands of light. Alas, your time idling here is rapidly approaching its end. Not much longer now until it all goes moving down the river that near broke the blade of light.”

He said nothing in return. They had all been informed, the Exarch had even handed over a clearly treasured book detailing parts of this story in its opening chapter. An event that would become known as Bloody Banquet not because it became the date of death of a Sultana way too young for a burden such as hers but because of the literal blood that would soon spill in these halls that were supposed to never have blood spilled in them. The Scions were unaware, the people who had not been present were aware but not worried since they knew the outcome, and the Warrior of Light had seemed to tread the fine line between a hysterical nervous breakdown and utter, unmoving apathy.

Hythlodaeus let out a cheerful hum as he snatched the still otherwise untouched glass from Emet-Selch’s hands and downed its contents within a heartbeat. “You never were fun at events such as these. Doubly so now given that you have your duty—should he ever deign to answer you and the other two, give my father my _warmest_ regards.” 

There was no way that the ever-flighty Seer did not know that they would request his help. Emet-Selch turned his head fully to glare at him—which the Seer only met with a wide but dead-eyed smile.

“How about you _join_ us for that time, _Gerun?”_

His dead eyes flared up with a dangerous glint, and Emet-Selch swore something in the aether nearby shifted in a strange way that he did not entirely understand. “Join you, _Emet-Selch?_ I would sooner impale myself on a blade of light than _speak_ with your deity.” His mouth twitched strangely and his smile all but turned into a deep, angry scowl. “You of all people, of _all people,_ should know _better_ than that, even through that heavy, heavy veil He put over your mind.”

“Fine,” he said and dismissively waved a hand through the air. “How about going with that piece of Alexis and talking some sense into Hydaelyn, then? If only for the sake of balance.”

Hythlodaeus moved so fast that Emet-Selch had barely the time to react. While already leaning against the wall, Hythlodaeus was now pinning him to it, their faces barely apart—he cursed under his breath, having nearly forgotten how fast he always moved when he felt like it.

The dangerous glint in his eyes had only intensified. Had he not known this person, Emet-Selch may have felt something akin to fear as Hythlodaeus merely smiled in a way that rivalled Lahabrea’s more unhinged grins ever since the Sundering.

“I would,” he began, tone soft and eyes wide open, and continued with an unusual emphasis on nearly every word, “sooner forge my own blade of light to impale myself with and _laugh_ as my being unravels. In a sense, it would be _a mercy,_ Emet-Selch. But given how _innocently_ you are suggesting this, you have _no idea,_ do you.” He closed his eyes, shook his head, and let go. Hythlodaeus shoved himself away so that Emet-Selch could straighten himself back up properly. “Think on that, my dear—I am afraid your time at this celebration has come to an end.”

With that, Hythlodaeus weaved his way through the crowd, and not a moment later all hell broke loose.

Emet-Selch only barely noticed that somewhere between emptying the glass and leaving, Hythlodaeus had carelessly tossed the glass onto the ground. How… very unlike him.

* * *

It was awkward, to say the least. Once the boy had been sufficiently calmed down and he along with the receptionist, the lordling, and the other “adventurers” had left to discuss something together, Emet-Selch had lagged behind only to see that the Warrior of Light had not moved from the chair they had chosen at the beginning of this conversation.

The great Warrior of Light, a supposedly famed Ascian-slayer, who supposedly had gone through hell and back unscathed, was sitting there with their head hanging and their eyes closed.

It was an eerie echo of a friend he had considered lost to the tides of the Sundering—for a moment he thought he saw them sit in the makeshift camp where the survivors took care of the injured or dying. Rather than sitting on the ground with torn robes and a half-scorched mask, however, they merely appeared to look ruffled by the long run and the escape via Chocobo carriage. Alexis had muttered to themself and wrung their hands nervously; the Warrior of Light in comparison sat there completely still. Frozen in time, almost, were it not for their quiet but fast breaths giving away that they were agitated.

He almost wanted to roll his eyes, but what Emet-Selch did in the end after much consideration and bristling at himself for even daring to compare Alexis to this mortal, was putting a hand on their shoulder and saying nothing.

They threw him a strange, almost appreciative glance.

“A season,” they said after a while. “We will remain here at Camp Dragonhead for a season, then Ishgard will open its gates for us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> get ready for the voice actor change as heavensward comes rolling in with snowstorms, dragons, and... well, it wouldn't be much of a canon divergence if i did kill everyone canon offs, would it?


	35. ACT V: A Void at your own Risk, Part 1

Whatever had truly gone down here was beyond him—but it made every bit of his soul crawl with a primordial fear he had not felt in centuries. Hells, it awoke phantom pains of grievous injuries and he near covered his ears as a ghastly, distant chorus of cackling arose. The only thing that prevented him from completely shutting down was the fact that there was no speck of darkness lingering in this place, given how oversaturated it was with light. This was not the void, it would never be the _same_ void even if it turned into one. It would not be much longer before the light rose to a swell, then to an all-consuming flood that some self-sacrificial fools might be able to halt in its track and turn it into a long, vast, empty sea of nothing from which then the creatures that would consume the rest of the remaining aether in blind hunger would rise.

He could shake the voices off and instead tried to focus on his mission while ignoring the dread that settled in his entire being.

People with the Echo would be able to see him in this state, much as the Warriors of Light were capable of seeing his master right now.

Most of them would be otherwise occupied however, and he only sought one certain person.

Despite all he had learned since the end of a world, Unukalhai still thought about his home. The First was a far cry from the Thirteenth when the balance had been tipped but with the Source not primed to receive a surplus of aether before the floodgates were let open, but he very much saw shades of what had happened with his home on this shard. Not that… not that there were any shades.

He shook his head and smacked his hands against the mask. “Focus, focus. There will be no voidsent crawling out of the woodworks. There will be no Warriors of Light corrupted by Primals and a deep, unsettling hunger that will try to tear you into pieces. You need to find Celaeno, naught more.”

Master Elidibus had handwaved his inquiry about why he needed to speak to the Warriors of Light of this world. Celaeno had answered directly to Mitron and Loghrif while she played a role in how to gently usher this world unto oblivion, and her reports had ceased after her apparent defeat at the hands of her erstwhile companions. He had always had the latent fear that she would act prematurely if left alone, but she was, for a lack of better words, effectively the only person he had left.

The general plan had involved the Shadowkeeper eventually being slain at the hands of the Warriors of Light. Unaware of Ascian machinations as this group was and would remain, Celaeno would be able to make her escape after they had left and then the rest would all to Loghrif and Mitron who were already rousing enough unrest in the favour of light as it was—the Shadowkeeper’s army was the sole balancing piece of darkness on the scale that ever slid towards the light. It made sense for one of the Void that had become the Thirteenth to serve as counter to light, even if Celaeno had never quite been happy with her choice to abandon the sinking ship and cast her lot with the Ascians for the time being until the chance to strike back and reclaim the Thirteenth came.

It had to come, she insisted at first.

She was also the one who lost that belief eventually as time marched on and the Void remained the Void.

He knew in part he retained the latent hope that their shared home could be saved thanks to Master Elidibus and his calm teaching methods. Celaeno was ever a firebrand, crackling with anger and regret over failing both the Mothercrystal and the Thirteenth. Once that anger fizzled out, all that remained of her was scorn.

Unukalhai hurriedly ran down a downtrodden pathway through a region unknown to him. On the Source this would have been La Noscea, he knew, and the Void’s designation he had long forgotten. He had not even been born when it had had a proper name other than the Frontier—because the Flood of Darkness had crawled to a slow halt and overtaken the seas and lower regions before rising up to devour what remained a few years later. Somewhere beside the coast Elidibus was speaking to the Warriors of Light, the band of utter fools tricked into turning this world into a wasteland by slaying the Shadowkeeper and somehow, _somehow,_ learning of Mitron ad Loghrif’s involvement and escalating the situation almost beyond repair.

The Source would need to be driven to a Calamity _quickly_ if anyone would wish to keep this Shard from turning into a desolate, bright, still wasteland just as the Thirteenth had all but turned into a violently churning and turning maelstrom.

By the time he found her standing near the edge of a cliff overseeing the sea, the sun had started to set. It had been up for too long and if he had heard right there were barely any hours left in the nights. Everything was too bright and too strange and the very moment the nights vanished completely he knew that the light would run rampant. The last few bells of daylight had kept the Flood of Darkness at bay and the horrid creatures somewhat under control, and certainly it would be the same here on the First.

Complying with her request from before, he removed the mask and shuddered at the lack of a sea breeze. Being on the Source for so long he had grown used to how a world was supposed to function despite the violent howling winds of the Thirteenth often catching up to him in his dreams. But unlike the Thirteenth where all seemed to be in perpetual motion to the point of there being no rest, ever, the First very much seemed to lack any movement whatsoever. The breeze was nearly dead, the birds had stopped singing for the most part and the only outliers were shockingly loud in that held breath of a world on the brink. 

“Celaeno,” he called for her softly. Her shoulders tensed and she did not move and did not look at him when he stood next to her. “I am… glad you are alright.”

It was sincere, but he saw her grimace ever so slightly where she stood.

“Are you unhurt?”

“… More or less,” she said, her voice just as distant as her expression. “Your timely as ever arrival means that the Emissary has arrived as well—am I correct with the assumption that he sought out my… the Warriors of Light of this world?”

“You are correct, yes. But tell me—you have had your hands in this, have you not?” She did not even move when he said that, and he closed his eyes. “Please, Celaeno. Different though our approaches may be, we do want the same thing in the end. I swear upon everything you hold dear, have _ever_ held dear, upon the homeland we lost… not a word will leave my lips about anything you tell me or tell me not. But please… tell me the truth.”

A heavy, almost uncharacteristic sigh escaped her and she started telling her story. 

As agreed, she had taken the mantle of Shadowkeeper and very quickly assimilated any balancing darkness into her once little, then shockingly influential reign while Loghrif and Mitron went and fanned the first specks of light. Once enough Echo-bearers had been crushed by the forces of darkness, Hydaelyn would surely spur Herself into action to raise an answer to that darkness. And that selfsame darkness, Loghrif had then suggested, would serve best as tool to further the light of these warriors. Thus, ever from the shade, the Shadowkeeper took a commoner’s name and befriended an unlikely Kholusian pair of a Hume and a Dwarf called Ardbert and Lamitt. As that journey continued, other souls under the guidance of Hydaelyn joined the group, and Celaeno masterfully led them down paths that would see them become true heroes.

The end goal of that had been the death of the Shadowkeeper at the hands of her supposed allies—for what else did Warriors of Light do but relentlessly chase down whatever upset the balance with little regard for the state of balance afterwards?

“I was met with refusal. _Refusal._ He threw down his weapon and said that he would not kill me and that I would serve better to repent for my crimes by living. Understand, Unukalhai? A Warrior of Light who broke stray from the path that was laid out for him. And his companions with him. I had… perhaps a moment of weakness. Of _hope._ That Ardbert and his… _our_ companions could break free and would save the First, just as you and I and the others failed to save ours. I led them towards Loghrif. They saw Loghrif undone.”

“Loghrif, who had specifically been tasked with carefully increasing the swell of light due to his finer aethersense skills than Mitron’s… Celaeno—“

“I expected Mitron to fly into a blind rage and use the light that Loghrif had so carefully harnessed against them—a sort of beating fire with more fire, given that the light was already the strongest force in this world,” she whispered and closed her eyes. “Never would I have expected the bloody fool to overlook past experiences and use the darkness I had gathered. He was slain, faster even than Loghrif was, the moment he left his hiding space to seek vengeance. And so, with darkness all but gone… you see the results. Ardbert and the others saw the results.”

Were it not for the shockingly bright sunset, he could have easily closed his eyes and re-enacted the selfsame scene in a world about to drown in its own darkness. It had risen after falling silent for a few years, was howling in unison with the creatures that had once been living beings now reduced to a state of inhumane hunger and grotesque mutation. He could have easily pretended to stand next to her once again, barely able to stand as he was all but bleeding to death agonisingly slowly with darkness blistering in his wounds but unable to take root due to the weakest kernel of a blessing of light banishing that dark.

Unukalhai stared at the sluggishly moving ocean that would soon come to a complete standstill—it was so very hard to imagine the turbulent and violent tides of an endless, starless sea of darkness in its place.

“You would have wanted them to help us save the Thir— _our_ home from dark eternal?”

“I believed them the right choice,” Celaeno whispered, a single tear rolling down her face. “And now they— _we_ doomed this Shard. The Emissary once more collects his bounty of light, pliant pieces to sow chaos on the Source. The Source, who never did anything to them as neither they did anything to us, and yet we choose to further that godsdamned Ardor on it.”

He put a hand against her arm. “This world will not turn into a Void if—“

“And how many people will _die_ for that? Each and every single soul on the First, and myriad others on the Source.” She turned around and stepped away. “I cannot do this twisted cycle again. If you believe that laying low and letting more and more people die for just a small, inconsistent, very much imaginary chance to reclaim our home to the Source, continue your path. I know the choice Ardbert and the others will make. They have no other choice, much as you and I once did. I may as well repay the debt I owe them by seeing this ending be as painless as possible for each and every soul in this world.”

With not a further word, Celaeno departed. The much too slow sunset had barely progressed, and Unukalhai stared after her with naught more than utter, seething agony, even after she was long gone and the sun had not changed much of its position.

* * *

The seals on this place were stable—for now. Sooner rather than later the Archbishop of Ishgard would depart for this place to gorge himself upon its aether, which in turn would weaken the seals if it did not outright break them.

The revelation that they were not going to stop the creation of White Auracite had troubled him for the longest time, considering that a very similar technology had been brought into circulation on the Thirteenth thanks to its dark overseer. Eventually the imprisoned Primal entities had corroded the minds of their carriers and turned them into slavering monsters that brutalised every living being that they spotted until eventually the hunger drove them to seek out entire settlements. Darkness followed in the Warrior of Light’s wake, their duty corrupted and Hydaelyn and Igeyorhm both unaware of what was happening until it was too late.

Igeyorhm, too, was standing on this rock formation—her expression was hard to read because of her mask, but it was easy enough to guess that she, too, was thinking about the Thirteenth while beholding Allag’s greatest creation yet. A means to entrap Primals summoned by the people they tried to forcefully take over, an eternal prison that would prevent the Primal from being summoned again while also weakening its Tempered due to a lost connection. Cracking open the shackles that had bound the Primal Bahamut had seen darkness swell and wash over Eorzea, drastically changing the realm that then fought its way back to a modicum of normalcy with tooth and nail.

The Warring Triad was a danger that could not be ignored. The Elder Primal Odin at the very least seemed content with haunting the Black Shroud on occasion to challenge a strong traveller and otherwise seemingly minded its own business. This ghastly reminder of what had brought the Thirteenth down, however, was but a ticking time bomb. 

“Is this… course of action _truly_ wise?”

Igeyorhm did not move the slightest when he asked that, the mask thankfully hiding his angry scowl and his voice just monotone enough to sound the same as always to her. She remained still, a black-clad ghoul who had raised all hells behind her and was now unable to outrun these hells.

The skies around Azys Lla were as turbulent as ever. Lightning danced through the thick veil of clouds and all but uselessly bounced off the immense Magitek shield that kept the floating continent out out of sight. If one were to move it back to the Burn, it would not even fit where it had once been any longer. Nigh countless years had trickled past and every moment spent with the flow of aether blocked saw more and more of the earth erode into pointless, empty sand that was then all but violently tossed aside by the arid winds that somehow still blew.

“It is necessary,” she said, her tone flat. “It is not flawless, but between our many choices, Lahabrea did have a point before he once more departed: the sooner this is done, the less likely the First is to escalate on a scale that I escalated the Thirteenth. Elidibus’ approach has merit too, make no mistake, but in the time it takes to set up an Ardor that way, the First may turn into a Void of Light. I cannot… I _will not_ let what I did to the Thirteenth repeat. Mitron acted rashly, yes, but his reason was clouded by grief. I was… always was… in full control of my facilities and did not stop until I had gone beyond the absolute limit.”

He had to admit, he resented her. He resented the Ascians, he resented the Source. Despite her repeated verbal confirmations that she was conscious of her guilt in this matter, despite the Source not having done a damn thing to him, he could not help but hated them all for still being around while his own home churned and whirled in the Rift as a Void. He and Celaeno had both agreed to bide their time and bite the hands that saw them saved from utter oblivion eventually, but the time had never come. Celaeno grew bitter and Unukalhai found himself engrossed in learning more about this balance that Elidibus kept so careful track of only so he could tell the entire careful construction to collapse when necessary. 

And while he carried the resentment close to his heart, he also could not deny that he was all but eating up any sort of information he received. It meant that he had an understanding of balance and how to trip the scales, how to potentially restore them—all he lacked was a way to undo a horrendous scale topple.

“… Any playground of Emet-Selch’s makes for an eerie battlefield, but this will suit us just fine.”

With that, she departed.

Unukalhai remained to glare at the statues commemorating the imprisoning of the Warring Triad while the thunderstorm kept on raging. 

* * *

Oh, he knew this was a horrible idea. Yet at the same time, there was something immensely liberating about becoming a problem down the line.

Admittedly, the guilt of letting the ever elusive Fourteenth snoop around the Crystal Tower when he was supposed to watch it so the missing Unsundered could piece the puzzle together by himself had been weighing on his mind lately. The Fourteenth was an intensely charming person with a smile that matched, but there was something strange and foreboding underneath that still exterior. Something that moved relentlessly and without a rest much as the void did, all underneath a cold exterior that seemingly never changed. Gerun was a contradiction all by himself, and his contradictory nature both kept the playing field static while ensuring there was ceaseless movement. 

His words had been almost innocent-sounding were it not for the utterly mischievous glint in his eyes as he spoke while circling yet another contraption Unukalhai had no idea what the use of was.

“They seem rather eager to leave you, an actual Warrior of Light, out of the equation. Were I you, why, I would make a problem out of myself and all but force them to take me along. There ought to be ample opportunities to set up a trap of some sort that forces them to take another person along. Now, whatever could this particular little machine be?”

Being involved in this mess as Elidibus’ little messenger, Unukalhai had extensive knowledge of the way the timeline was supposed to work. Whatever he did not understand, the Oracle usually reviewed with him to refresh her own memory as well. Inevitability appeared to be a rather common theme in a few happenstances.

Primals would need to be slain, even if Lahabrea’s ever droning voice told Igeyorhm to watch Bismarck and then speak with the Archbishop once again to ensure she would not be around for the Primal Ravana’s fall. That precise fall, however, was the first opportunity Unukalhai had to make a problem out of himself, as Gerun had put it.

The Warrior of Light in the past had teamed up with the heretic Lady Iceheart who also bore the Echo to travel to the Churning Mists for an audience with the Great Wyrm Hraesvelgr. In order to even get there, however, they needed to traverse the Dravanian Forelands and needed permission to travel up Sohm Al to reach the floating islands above.

A hunter’s garb was not precisely comfortable—doubly so because he had to avoid looking like a hunter from the Dravanian Forelands. Instead he travelled to Idyllshire, a heap of ruins in what remained of Sharlayan on this continent, and purchased whatever he could to look like an adventuring hunter.

He could easily bide his time and sit around to wait for them to arrive in the Forelands, perhaps even gaining some notoriety as adventurer here as a small warning to the others.

With Iceheart involved in the attack on Ravana, however, the group would certainly be forced to at least let him fight the Primal with them should he appear as yet another prisoner—a prisoner with the Echo.

After all, what sort of monster refused help from a fellow prisoner?

He but needed to watch the Forelands for a while and then get himself captured by the bugmen shortly before the Warriors of Light and Lady Iceheart deliberately got themselves caught.


	36. ACT V: A Void at your own Risk, Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (uploads fanfic while in the praetorium on my lahabrea alt)
> 
> so... that trailer, huh

He watched as Lahabrea slammed Emet-Selch into the wall with a snarl. This little spat had been a long time in the making, and Elidibus certainly was not going to involve himself in this mess, even if he had to admit he was on Lahabrea’s side in this particular case.

“When, oh _when,_ were you going to tell us _any_ of that?”

“It never came up,” Emet-Selch hissed back.

Dark arts were supposed to be reported right away, given how dangerous they were for the general public. Whatever the level of control there was, or whatever the intention, it was not to be taken lightly. It did not help the slightest in this case that the Speaker had very much woken up on the wrong side of the bed—and nothing unlocked the sheer rage that Lahabrea held in his heart better than a dull headache. Elidibus idly flexed his fingers and remained quiet. 

“Merely the fact that there was someone practising dark arts right inside Amaurot ought to have been more than enough reason to report it—doubly so given the fact that your darling friend now _just so_ happens to be a perfect little servant of Hydaelyn!”

Emet-Selch shoved the furious Speaker off him and harrumphed loudly. The glowering between them was amazing to witness, but Elidibus continued flexing his hand and stared at this body’s fingers instead.

“We know not who is responsible for Hydaelyn in detail—who is to say that the Warrior of Light’s original self, dark arts or not, was involved with that? We cannot tell! We have no way of knowing—doubly so since it is unclear if any on Her side _escaped_ the Sundering like we did!”

Lahabrea’s reply was a furious snarl.

“Do not think that you can intimidate me into answering you in the way you want me to, Speaker!”

Elidibus closed his hand and cleared his throat.

“If the two of you would be so kind as to cease your childish arguing—you both have a point, make no mistake, but it does beget one very important question that we, too, have not quite figured out other than Hydaelyn’s true identity. The question of how precisely we escaped the Sundering.”

At the very least it seemed as if that calmed them down a little. Lahabrea’s anger significantly mellowed down, despite the sheer fury in his voice as he spoke. “There is no explanation other than His hand guiding us to safety.”

He shook his head slightly. “And how would you explain _Gerun,_ then? Hilariously one-sided emotional attachments all aside, had Zodiark truly intervened, surely He would have attempted to save the rest of the active Convocation overseeing the city and its survivors in His name. Temper your anger, Lahabrea—I am under no illusion that He did not at the very least attempt to save us from this sundered fate. But for the question that remains… why was Gerun, who owed his allegiance to none but himself, also spared?”

They had been in the same room, but somehow Elidibus did not believe that it had gone down the way Lahabrea suggested. There was no doubt that Zodiark had been involved, but there were too many inconsistencies in the story that were more and more starting to bother him. If the room in general had been spared, surely it might have affected the rest of the building in some way—but no other soul in the building had been spared.

“Given _your_ latest encounter with him… could he have done anything of the sort, Emet-Selch?” It was a baseless suggestion he threw into the room, mostly to appease Lahabrea’s rage.

Emet-Selch immediately shook his head. “You of all people ought to know that _Gerun_ has little to no control over his powers. He represses them, resents them, bottles them up until they explode out of him and then the cycle begins anew. Even if he had exploded in that very moment, he would not have been conscious after the Sundering were that the case—and I am fairly certain I remember his being the first voice I heard afterwards.”

That much all three of them agreed on. Lahabrea crossed his arms with an annoyed huff but kept his comments to himself. Emet-Selch looked utterly and completely displeased as per usual.

Something had happened, and the sole lead they had was their missing Fourteenth who kept dancing in and out of the story as he damn well pleased.

* * *

Dividing their forces was the best approach to this particular situation, but it would also speed up the overall amount of time it took, the Warrior of Light had said. Part of him desperately wanted to split their little group, but any such approaches were gently interrupted by the Count saying that this was not a race and they could take as much time as they needed.

Thus, somehow, they had all found themselves in the Sea of Clouds.

Emet-Selch was staring into the distant skies with narrowed eyes, likely tracking where Azys Lla’s current location was—perhaps to ignore the utter incompetence at show here. The Warrior of Light also very decidedly pinched the bridge of their nose and very calmly explained that they needed to waste some time before they would meet with the servant boy again and then realise where the little lordling had been taken to an utterly enraged Lahabrea. Who, in turn, was still playing the role of Speaker, an adventurer who had been given the permission to go with his companions again but was to refrain from too much excitement.

The Oracle and the Exarch meanwhile had apparently not gotten sick of the view yet.

He knew her backstory, of course—the story of a child who had not been given a choice for the longest time before she had been given the chance to carve her own fate. Rather than the Oracle of Light Minfilia she had been granted the chance to be Ryne. Still the Oracle of Light but out of her own volition, soon joined by a girl her age called the Oracle of Darkness in her duty to return the First to balance. He had watched, of course, but there was not exactly much he knew about the Oracle of Darkness. Very likely she had been moulded by Emet-Selch somehow as a counteragent to the Oracle of Light should aught go awry. In any case, the Oracle of Light was a factor he had had to plain around most delicately given her sensitivity to all things aether despite being a mere mortal. While a far cry from what she may have been and what her soul had most certainly once been, she became not even an issue once all was said and done.

Her inexperience in combat proved to be her undoing, along with her desperate eagerness to help the Exarch and the Warrior of Light. That, and the fact that little by little the Oracle and Warrior of Darkness became figures in Norvrandt that were seen as strange, difficult or even dangerous. After all, what sorts of people used the dark—in a world where Warriors of Light had ever paved the way?

The nuance of balance had been lost to most of these, and within a single lifetime a celebrated and beloved hero became a shady character who skulked about in a world that no longer needed them, and with them was the Oracle of Darkness. Why the Crystal Exarch and the Oracle of Light desired such company few understood and fewer wanted to understand.

The Exarch, on the other hand, was a mystery much like the Warrior of Light was. It was not hard to figure out what drove him—mortals were so endearingly simple with their sources of inspiration and drive—but it was much harder to understand how he got to that point. Few were as resilient and long-lived as he was, and Emet-Selch’s findings had died with him.

What little the Exarch revealed of his circumstances and decisions all felt unnecessarily obtuse and unusually driven for a mortal.

Or… perhaps… perhaps he had misjudged some mortals.

On the other hand it simply made _no sense._

Emet-Selch’s confirmation that the bland archivist had gone on to become one who practised dark arts had been a punch in the guts. Many people did change after the first Fall of Amaurot—which made tracing back to the true origin of Hydaelyn nigh impossible. It could have been anyone not involved with Zodiark and the restoration of the planet. That list was long and every single soul on that list had points speaking for and speaking against an involvement.

Alexis the archivist clearly had not been in a good mental state after seeing Amaurot ablaze and seeing many of their acquaintances and friends die, and the survivors falling apart one way or another. But that selfsame unwell state both spoke for and against them being involved.

Their parter Miltos, their close friend Aigle, most of their surviving friends that did not resolve to work with the Convocation and instead do their own thing to help the star reach its former glory… all of them equally possible and impossible.

Gerun—Hythlodaeus—had been the Convocation’s first thought thanks to his refusal to help with the plan. He had refused time and time again that he was involved with Hydaelyn, had even all but shouted that he had refused the group, but before they could press him for more information it all had gone to hell in a handbasket.

His mother….

Elidibus had to keep himself from _snorting_ at that. The mistress of Anamnesis Anyder was a possibility considering her dedication to the people, but that selfsame dedication also made those methods too out of character for her. A master of subtle manipulation—but certainly not subtle enough for _that_. As much as Gerun would have tried to throttle him for it, it was very obvious that he took after both his parents in ways that were not obvious to the general populace. But in the end, all three had cared deeply for the city in both extremely selfish and extremely selfless ways.

Emet-Selch glared at him from where he stood, but then Meteor at the same moment said that it was about high time they went to properly wait for the servant. 

* * *

Another fascinating thing to observe from the inside rather than the outside was the way the Scions behaved. One by one they had split off and stayed behind to buy the Warriors of Light time to escape; while once again not uncommon there had been so much sincerity behind those words that even he had paused to think about it. The only one Meteor had tried to reach for, however, had been the woman who would go on to become the Word of the Mother, her fate entangled with Hydaelyn’s in ways that she did not know. That once radiant soul of hers, now completely pierced by hundreds of horrid spikes of light to ensure that her essence belonged to Hydaelyn in its entirety.

The same spikes, though less pronounced, were embedded in the souls of the girl and the Warrior of Light and every other Echo-bearing mortal on all shards. According to Emet-Selch the selfsame spikes were conspicuously absent from Gerun’s soul despite something about it being plain _off._

But in a sense, he figured, those spikes were what kept mortal souls from ever reaching too far for the stars to prevent another tragedy—or perhaps to simply prevent them from learning just how twisted their mortality truly was. After all, light brought radiant stillness.

Watching the boy who had become quite a healer on the First bumble through this trial was agonising in ways that he had never quite thought about before that very moment. Of course a fighter was made, not born; but it was still embarrassing just how little the boy contributed to the fight while the Warrior of Light may as well have been a monster unleashed in comparison.

Then again… what were they if not some sort of abominable outlier? People had wondered aloud behind their back whether that strength was natural or not. The Antecedent dismissed such murmurs with claiming it was a gift from the Mothercrystal—in a sense it was, but the fact that they remained comically self-aware through all that light was baffling.

* * *

The visiting lordling—as he slowly but steadily realised as time went on in that infernal household, likely bastard-born—pulled him aside once the crowd dispersed a little.

“Terribly sorry to be a bother, Emissary, but you appear to be the most… how to put this… level-headed? Would you mind answering a question?”

This man was yet another outlier that neither helped nor directly opposed his theories on mortals. Spread thin as it was, it was incredibly hard to guess which bystander this one had been, and frankly he did not care about it in any case. Haurchefant Greystone was, much like any mortal, a bother. A bother with an unhealthy interest in adventurers, though given what he had pieced together about this family’s history, not all that surprising. Unfortunately for him it meant that of course he thought that they got along smashingly.

Something that Lahabrea had no qualms about denying. Emet-Selch and the Exarch were both hard to read at times, and while the Oracle was gentle and friendly it was clear that she only saw the best in people despite a good measure of hesitation being necessary.

“Why ask me and not Meteor?”

“Well, you see… the question concerns them. Or rather, I have been wondering if I have said anything to offend them lately. They have been keeping me at arm’s length for no reason whatsoever and I did wonder if you had an idea what I had done or how to correct this. It was never my intention to—“

He raised a hand to silence the blubbering dolt. “It certainly is not my place to speak about this, but I believe you remind them of someone they lost in quite a cruel, fully avoidable way.”

“… Oh.”

“Your concern for their well-being is _touching._ But that is not something you may be able to help with—let them work through it on their own or with minimal support and I am quite certain they will return to treating you the same as they always have.”

It was rare for Primals to outright _kill_ someone they could have tempered instead. Or have them ordered killed by their own. While his death had been avoidable, given that what had killed him had been aimed at the Warrior of Light, it was not the only such case in a relatively short span of time.

He knew, of course, that Unukalhai harboured both adoration and utter hatred for him. He had known from the moment he had extended a hand to these Warriors of Light that had failed to save their world from the all-devouring tides of darkness that he was inviting enemies into the heart of their operations and that eventually, sooner or later down the line, they would lash out to get revenge for what had befallen their home.

The report of the Warring Triad had been spotty the later it got, and the last bit of information regarding the Primal Zurvan included the fact that Unukalhai narrowly avoided death thanks to mortal interference. A Garlean of all people had taken the blow meant for the younger Warrior of Light.

But much like this Lord Haurchefant, the Garlean had died to a blow meant to kill aimed at someone else. Why the Primals did not simply temper _everyone_ in range as quickly as possible and then have the Echo-bearers outnumbered and overpowered was beyond him.

Then again… then again the blueprint of any Primal was Zodiark. A being meant to preserve and restore first and foremost. Perhaps a small bit of that preservation and restoration focus still extended to the humans that the Primals were summoned to fend off.

“I had… no idea,” Haurchefant said and shook his head.

“Adventurers tend to have their reasons for withholding information regarding their own self—I do believe they are very desperately trying to avoid doing you a disservice by merely seeing their… departed friend.”

Oh, Elidibus knew he sounded like a hypocrite when Haurchefant thanked him and said that he was a good guy.

It didn’t matter all that much.


	37. ACT V: A Void at your own Risk, Part 3

This entire mission was bogus, but no one asked for his opinion. It was already bad enough that they had to deal with this intensely short-tempered mortal who insisted on making his life harder by a large margin simply by being a reckless fool with a rude mouth he liked to run whenever he deemed the conjurer’s work passable at best. The fact that the other Echo-bearer and the idiot started fighting nigh the moment they decided to leave the blasted cold lands of whatever behind did not make it any easier, and even the normally calm Elidibus looked ready to jump both of them to start pummelling the everloving lights out of them.

Whenever they weren’t fighting, the Lady Iceheart with the Echo was almost embarrassingly obsessed with Emet-Selch’s personal little menace.

He had personally worked on the art of summoning at the behest of the creator of Allag to ensure that it was dangerous to use, destructive when mastered, hard to learn, yet not dangerous to the integrity of the Source. The moment Emet-Selch had drawn the book Lahabrea had expected the worst—and he certainly did not disappoint in that regard.

For a bloody moment he felt thrown back into the halls of the Akademia where he was discussing something of great import regarding the latest batch of maritime creatures with the back-then Mitron, only to be interrupted by a gaggle of giggling children running from a caretaker. They had both laughed at that mess and tried to continue their conversation regarding the use of one particular jellyfish subspecies just as the gaggle of children and the caretaker both stopped and ran the other way. Before either of them could ask, they were all but buried underneath a giant wall of obnoxious fluff that made strange noise as it pursued its likely wayward creators.

It had been the first appearance of Moogles, and Lahabrea did prefer to not think about it for a prolonged amount of time.

Given that Emet-Selch had apparently once again chosen the path of being an obnoxious menace to make up for Gerun’s absence, however, of course the Egi he had managed to manifest was based on the Moogle Primal from a while ago. Or, rather than anything else, he had deliberately based an Egi on it. It wasn’t as if they did not have a choice of any and all Primals.

Why on good earth this woman was so obsessed with that particular malpractice of ancient arts was absolutely and utterly beyond him and he was not going to bother. Doubly not so when the Warrior of Light excused themself to take care of a haunted military base on their own while they all continued walking through the snowstorm.

It was plain ridiculous. Plain ridiculous.

* * *

Much like not too long ago when he had been here with Igeyorhm, this place had been appalling and the radiating energy of the Primal had been a sight to behold. They had all known that several things were ever so slightly off in this forsaken place that was barely more than a shade of its former glory. There were whispers of a peculiar traveller who had passed through here not too long ago, tales of a young one who seemingly walked with a Voidsent’s flames following his every step. While not unusual for mortal thaumaturges messing with the remnants of the link to the Thirteenth to quite literally get burnt by the ravenous creature answering their call, there was nothing of the usual telltale signs of Voidsent involvement to be found. There was no horrendously massacred prey, the only aetheric imbalance shone brightly in the distant hives of Lost ast Gnath, and most of the whispers from the hunters were reverent rather than frightened.

He had had a feeling the moment they departed and left the two fools not immune to Tempering behind. Something about this seemed to perfectly set up to be an annoyance in the way vein that Gerun set up his usual nonsense to be what Elidibus and the Exarch called a minor, likely not important divergence from the timeline’s normal flow. No, he almost _smelled_ the Seer’s involvement despite very likely now showing his face as per usual—and the process of elimination did not exactly leave many options.

As far as he had figured it out, it appeared that the most major divergences were directly related to knowing about the time travel mess—or being close to someone who knew. While the outcome was still the same, Nabriales and that Scion had walked a different road to that same ending to some degree. The Exarch had worried out loud about another future Scion he apparently knew personally immediately recognising both him and the Emissary as ‘G’raha Tia’ and asking questions. Process of elimination left few possible answers for what might have caused this mild and uncomfortable disruption.

Answer one was Gerun, of course. Given that one’s slippery tendencies, however, it seemed fairly unlikely for him to be anything but vaguely threatening until they toppled the playing board over to hammer it against his head. Which they would have to, eventually, unless the divergences started to roll in in force so that his inevitable death down the line somehow averted itself.

The second answer was so hilariously obvious that he was astounded that Elidibus had likely not considered it himself.

That little Warrior of Light from the Thirteenth.

Much to everyone’s surprise but not Lahabrea’s, it was indeed that little one who they found also taken captive by the Gnath. Given that they had little to no time to truly speak to him before the Lord of the Hive descended upon them and the Lady Iceheart showed what Nabriales had taught her regarding summoning, forgetting that she was at a hilarious elemental disadvantage here.

The kid looked so damn pleased with himself when all of them were challenged by the triumphant Lord of the Hive—Lahabrea spent a moment marvelling at Igeyorhm’s handiwork before turning his attention to the more important thing of avoiding any injuries.

At the very least battling deities as such made siphoning energy out of their present worshippers easy; for lesser trained eyes such as that of Lady Iceheart it looked as if the Primal killed to sustain itself despite the fact that the Lord of the Hive in particular was a deity that merely desired to protect its children.

Despite the boy all but forcing himself into the situation, it was clear that he was a far cry from the weak child desperately trying to fight back against the monsters that had once been his fellow Warriors of Light. His spells were more precise than what the Exarch slung around. While most certainly being as disappointing as every mortal, even the Ascended, Unukalhai at the very least seemed to be battle-ready as opposed to the messes that Hydaelyn oft brought up against their machinations. Then again, Elidibus had very lovingly raised this double-edged blade that both loved and utterly despised him; a conflicting pair of emotions meant for a conflicting Warrior of Light beside the Bringers of Darkness.

He understood how the mortal fools in this region misunderstood the thaumaturge to be a Voidsent on the run. Every other step he took sparked with the lighting that had ever marked the thaumaturgy equivalent on the Thirteenth. He traced patterns on the ground—small aetherial traps that went and blasted whoever dared stepping into them.

When the Lord of the Hive toppled and fell, rather than argue about the boy involving himself they all made a run for it. Iceheart waited for them somewhere in the hive and together they ran and ran until they were a fair way away from the hive. Playing his role as still not entirely recovered from nearly dying, he doubled over and wheezed a few times to catch his breath.

It was that precise moment that Elidibus chose to blow up, judging from his downright _furious_ expression as the turned towards the boy. As much as he denied it, there was a definitive amount of fondness for that reckless mortal involved from his side.

Lahabrea rolled his eyes and choked out a laugh. Iceheart did not know and it was best if she did not know, and thus _someone_ had to defuse the situation before it came to a head. “Colour me surprised… I had not pegged you for the… suicidally reckless type, boy.”

“You… you know this boy?” asked Iceheart in surprise, and Lahabrea knew that all eyes were on him.

“As has been so graciously explained, I was occupied for quite a while before I returned to our… merry group. _Comet_ here was involved with that mess, and while we parted amicably I had believed we would not so soon run into one another.” He shrugged and breathed out loudly. “Naturally I have been proven incorrect. Pleasure meeting you again, Comet—has the Echo caused you to lose your functioning self-preservation or was this a genuine accident?”

Unukalhai’s stunned expression turned into a bright smile befitting a child his age. “A little bit of both, I suppose. Although I cannot say I can complain when it leads our paths back together, Warrior of Light.”

It was a backhanded insult, and Lahabrea narrowed his eyes. Yes, Gerun was definitely involved in sending this brat here to make an annoyance of himself.

At the very least Elidibus’ initial anger had simmered down despite him most certainly emanating disappointed energies still. Emet-Selch and the other rabble seemed to be enjoying the show.

Ah, he hated them. He hated them all quite a lot.

* * *

Floating islands had been a regular occurrence on this continent. Part of Amaurot had been constructed on one such floating island that had been left to circle above the actual city. It had crashed into the nearby sea with the end of the world and not even Zodiark had bothered with raising it again. That selfsame island was what mortals called Vylbrand nowadays, but the fact that the Sea of Clouds and the Churning mists harboured what appeared to be the remnants of the floating islands made him stop for a moment to take the sight in.

Most of the time he had been involved with the lands of Eorzea in particular due to their unique aetherial situation right at the centre of where the Lifestream intersected multiple times. Given his tendency to not stop for a moment until the Ardor was invoked and the plotting for the next one began, he had not quite thought about the once ridiculous abundance of floating islands all but vanishing except for a few pointed reminders that once it had been hundreds of these islands wherever one turned to look. Most of the larger ones had crashed during Termination, often killing whoever lived on top of or below it without a survivor. Those larger ones Zodiark had not raised back to the skies when reinvigorating the planet due to the sheer amount of energy they consumed.

Given how the ground here was cracked and uneven, how some parts were dead ground and others suddenly had water on them while nestled snugly between more uneven ground, it stood to reason that either during or after the Sundering a large amount of the remaining floating islands all were crashed together to make this particular landscape. It was clear that the lusher ones that floated above the more forested regions of the continent had become the Sea of Clouds. Azys Lla he knew had been torn from the region now known as the Burn. The so-called Floating City of Nym had been built on scraps of extremely small floating remnants pulled together by Elidibus.

But the Churning Mists?

No, he reckoned that Hydaelyn had been involved with this. Knowing that the dragons were an alien race She permitted to seek shelter on the Source it stood to reason that She had at some point while they were not watching properly had created this place for them. The resident Moogles were pests that got in the way of his thinking while they did _errands_. The sheer gall of these obnoxious fluffballs was astounding, but knowing that children had created them just as the Elementals had been created by children explained a lot about their behaviour.

Of particular interest to him was the utter dissonance between a clearly man-made building in once-pristine white and the ominously crackling bunch of floating islands covered by an enormous aether cloud.

Such bloated clouds of certain kinds of aether had been an irregular occurrence across the star—most settlements had their own dedicated group of people capable of thinning that aether and spreading it somehow. Certain bloated clouds were native to one region only; the Flareseekers naturally dealt with fire-aspected clouds while there was an entire bureau dedicated to dealing with overly obnoxious bloats of water aether in Amaurot, and the Stargazer Peaks dealt with their unnatural glaciers quietly and swiftly.

These floating islands were awash in electricity in ways that mortals did not notice until it was too late.

On the other hand it meant that this region, due to its proximity to the highest activity, was a centre of change. It had certainly not been that way when he had all but seduced the mortals with promises of eternity if they but butchered the dragon and consumed her eyes. This lighting-sparked and roiling dragon den had not existed back then; even given his business with manipulating mortals he would have noticed something of this magnitude.

No, it seemed the dragons had somehow created this strange aetheric phenomenon. One cloaked itself in silence akin to ice and light, the other dwelled within a sparking black hole akin to the rage that consumed it. Whatever change was going to happen, it was deeply linked to the dragons of this region.

But the Warrior of Light had claimed that their first journey, this very journey, would end in failure.

Interesting.

“Speaker!” cried a familiar voice. He turned to see the Lady Iceheart walk towards him with a bouquet of lightly sparking flowers. “I have heard that you were sent to stand guard at this place. I presume the Moogles never quite told you what to stand lookout for, but Meteor said that if you were not dead on the ground from boredom by the time I returned, I was to collect you and return to Moghome together.”

Despite her trying her best, it was clear that her Echo and her link to Hydaelyn was all but screeching that something was dangerous and eerie around her. After all he was the enemy that she had no idea existed still despite Nabriales’ demise. Whatever power she had hoped to turn against them would have failed—he had to acknowledge the sheer brass of this woman to choose the element closest to light unknowingly when instructed by a servant of darkness. The Warrior of Light in particular seemed rather happy to have her back, and despite her clearly lacking a good judge of character, she was rather stout for a mortal. Many fought for their beliefs no matter how wrong they were, but there was something about her agreeing to a peaceful approach despite the blood on all their hands.

Idealistic nonsense, but… how far removed from the Amaurotine approach was this? He couldn’t… he couldn’t remember.

He rolled his eyes and quietly followed the Lady Iceheart back to the lair of these infernal Moogles.

If only Mitron, the real Mitron and not the sundered mockery that had been present ever since the Sundering, were here to suffer those insufferable fluffballs with him again.


	38. INTERLUDE VII: Fettered, Unfettered

It was one of these charming days where time refused to move forwards or backwards. With the new Emet-Selch settled into his duties and the general nonsense paperwork dealt with, brutally boring normalcy had returned to the Bureau of the Architect—which of course meant that something was bound to require more than a provisional check-up by the Chief. Rather than bothering the Architect with that particular mess, he had left his office with a heavy sigh and instead gone to review it with Alexis over at Anamnesis Anyder. The floor they oversaw that particular day was rarely used by more than one person at a time, and it seemed that on this fine day of pouring rain that one person was him.

They lived with two people, which was not an unusual configuration in Amaurot—especially not on the floating part of it that all three of them hailed from. No wonder that they decided to stick together when they moved to the ground-locked major part of the city despite the ground-dwellers thinking that sharing an apartment with more than one person they weren’t related to was decidedly odd. In any case, one of the people they lived with had apparently dropped by to hand over lunch and thus the three of them took the sole desk in that part of Anamnesis with his documents scattered on it.

“Odd case, very odd case,” the friend who went by the name Aigle all but chirped in amusement after a few minutes of silence that felt like a bloody eternity. “But as you mentioned, I do think that something similar has gone through the process before. At the very least it would explain this odd sense of deja-vu.”

“I am rather relieved that it is not just me, then.” Hythlodaeus sighed and stretched his legs under the desk. “I had assumed the proper paperwork was in the bureau but I was mistaken, leading us here.”

“A wild goose chase based on a vague feeling of deja-vu… coming from you?” said Alexis rather deadpan and shook their head. “From the resident clairvoyant?”

He rolled his eyes. “You know I do not exactly choose what to see. Why, were I in full control, I would have prevented myself from finding such rude friends!”

“You failed step one an eternity ago when you befriended the rudest person in Amaurot other than the Speaker, Hythlodaeus.”

“Why, I ought to work on my reputation then. If anyone deserves the title of rudest person in Amaurot other than the Speaker it is me, not Hades. Hades merely hates interaction that is forced upon him.”

The three of them snickered together. After a moment of silence following that, however, Alexis got up.

“Well, don’t think this section’s gonna do us any good. You two stay here, I have an inkling as to where it is.”

“Six eyes see more than two, Lex,” Aigle said calmly. “Why don’t we come with you?”

They shook their head, and Hythlodaeus’ already questionable mood sunk when he noticed the short, worried glance they threw him. “Ah, I… Ai, maybe, but… the head mistress is in today and in that particular section. So we would have to go without Chief Hythlodaeus.” 

Of course that harpy of a mother had to be around on this lousy, charming day of nothing ever moving. He knew he was going to expire from boredom if he waited for these two to return, but going with them sounded just about as appealing as Hades’ attempts at cooking without any created tools.

He heaved himself out of his chair with a sigh and put on his usual smile. The one that several people said gave made him look rather charming from afar but gave him the aura of a wild animal up close. “While I do appreciate the sentiment, Aigle here has the right idea. Three sets of eyes see better than one or even two, and believe me when I say that I am rather talented at ignoring people.”

Alexis still looked nervous but did not try to stop him. A small victory in the greater scope of things; Hades would have insisted until the last bit of daylight vanished and then nothing would have gotten done. He followed the pair with a smile and laughed, even joined the conversation they were having. No one else would have to see the angry gloomy cloud that had his head in its thundering grip. Hilariously, lightning flashed and thunder indeed roared when they entered the section that Alexis suspected to hold the information he needed. How topical, seeing as Alexis near immediately raised a hand to greet their superior and immediately started speaking so that the head mistress had not a moment to even _ask_ how Hythlodaeus’ day was going.

It was going lousy, he would have said with a cheerful smile before taking off to look for what he needed.

She made direct eye contact with him while Alexis spoke nervously, however. As a child he had glared at her and his father in defiance most of the time, but he managed a level blank stare that did not give away a single bit about his opinion on this meeting. Her aether quivered ever so slightly with something that _might_ have been _concern_ and an uncertain amount of _guilt,_ but he was not going to look at that closer. As far as he was concerned he was but Chief Hythlodaeus here for bureau-relevant research and she was the Head Mistress of Anamnesis Anyder.

As long as she stayed out of his personal space it was all going to go well.

* * *

There were several people who ignored his personal space. Alexis usually got close to him to poke a finger into his forehead to point out that perhaps the smart guy ought to think like an idiot to get a solution for an issue. Sometimes it was necessary back at the bureau, it certainly was required whenever he had to make an appearance as Gerun with foreign dignitaries. Hades did, usually while falling asleep and sliding off to the side, sometimes to copy him likewise ignoring Hades’ personal space. Ophion did it out of habit.

He was starting to believe that the oh-so-esteemed Elidibus was doing it to get on his nerves in particular.

Perhaps it was not even _meant_ to be aggravating in the long run; the previous Gerun had been a very sociable, approachable and friendly person who seemingly did not mind any sort of physical contact. A year was far from enough time to realise that this Gerun had left the office and he was someone else entirely—at the very least the general public had the decency to _apologise._ Elidibus—

No.

No, he was going to play the petulant child the public had believed him to be due to his tendency to do things on his own in a desperate and contradictory attempt to both go against his parents’ wishes yet somehow fitting into society before he decided that his energy was best spent elsewhere.

It wasn’t as if the rest of the bloody Convocation even was in the same room. Emet-Selch was fast asleep in his seat next to the map of Amaurot and was very unlikely to wake. It was simply too miserably hot this summer for him to function. Hythlodaeus, who had been pointing at a particular spot on the map for a moment before going on about how this particular project would impact the people on that particular street, sneered to the side.

His father had walked around the desk and leaned forwards to see where Hythlodaeus had been pointing—of course that meant he was effectively glued to him at this point.

“If you would be so kind, _Rafael,_ take a step further away from me lest I do something truly outrageous,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

Hades’ eyes immediately snapped open and turned towards Elidibus and Gerun.

Hythlodaeus was bristling.

Elidibus at first looked confused, then angry for a split second, the quietly took a step away.

“Thank you very much, Emissary.”

* * *

Maybe for a moment he felt regret, staring up at the skies that had been ablaze not too long ago. It meant the Convocation had succeeded where he had failed.

The regret died before it had a chance to settle. No matter what, the Emissary Elidibus, Rafael, _Zodiark,_ was not a person he had liked.

Besides, the smell of burnt flesh all around him made it hard to think. 

* * *

All he did was laugh. 

Laugh so hard he thought that someone uninvolved in that mess heard. 

Hythlodaeus had given the his father his thoughts in the most blunt way possible. He had considered it insane, it still was insane, it had cost too many lives. 

But this? This was just laughable. Of all people, _of all people—_

Of course it had to be her to fight fire with fire. Fight the Emissary with his own poison. 

He choked out that he would sooner kill himself than side with them or the Convocation. 

It wasn’t as if they all had their own free will any longer. He looked at Hades and saw a stranger named Emet-Selch. Not even the usually stiff Ophion seemed the same any longer. Whatever they had done in detail when they summoned Zodiark with an aetherial sacrificial pyre, it had shorn part of their free will away. To some degree they were all thralls to this deity of theirs, and this particular situation was _not_ going to end any better. A thin voice he knew to be his own was telling him that it would only make everything worse. 

“No. Seven and thirteen hells take me and gobble me up into aetherial particles. Tell your Head Mistress _precisely_ that.”

* * *

The pain that was blooming in his chest near took him out the moment he stepped out of his own portal.

Approaching Hades had been ill-advised at best and, as he learned now, fatally idiotic at worst. He had so desperately longed to say _yes_ to any of this idiot’s suggestions but he _could not._ Yet despite refusing both to appease the other, it seemed that this vessel had reached its hard, hard limit pre-emptively and against his will. 

He keeled over with both hands desperately clutching at his chest, fighting back the urge to violently cough—he knew that he would only start hurling blood before collapsing and being forced to disengage.

He was not going to give his audience that show. No, he was going to remain a disappointment through and through.

“Your damn… gods… preserve me…!” he hacked and left.

Whoever found the corpse of a realm-renowned historian could deal with _that_ particular fallout. 

Hythlodaeus—no, Gerun the Seer—was going to give these idiots attempting to balance the scales a hint that not even the dull mortals could misinterpret if they had their wits about them.


	39. ACT V: A Void at your own Risk, Part 4

On a surface level, he behaved oddly to both his fellow Unsundered and mortals alike. Flighty, indecisive, actively morose and scathing, both unusually cruel and unspeakably soft. A predator wearing his prey’s skin; prey posing as a predator to escape more violence. For all intents and purposes, a clear divide ran through his being that left him in an incomprehensibly contradictory state to even the strongest cases of aethersight. He was moving and not moving, he was constantly evolving and reverting.

On a surface level, Gerun the Seer was simply an odd person with something dark roiling deep within him.

On a medium level it became clearer that there was something intensely wrong with him. Hades had finally started catching up on that, but he had no name or explanation for the oddity that all but rent him asunder while not harming the slightest crease of corporeal aether that made him _Hythlodaeus._ It was almost lovingly kept in eternal stasis, like a creation matrix placed on a shelf in the deepest reaches of Anamnesis Anyder and not a change coming as more and more dust settled upon him. Yet at the same time another part of him violently lashed against that stasis. It shook the dust off, demanded change and return to a world he knew was lost, demanded he sprung into action and burned brighter than the brightest tendril of Lifestream that escaped its underground confinement. Once it had ran both below and above, had woven paths through the stars and carved the planet hollow to flow freely and emerged in only small caverns that were centred bustling spouts of energy that attracted the Spoken to settle nearby.

On a medium level, Hythlodaeus of Amaurot was in constant agony over the two distinct directions he was being pulled into.

And on the lowest possible level, beyond walls he had built so many years ago that he had lost count of them, beyond even the fondest memories of both home and the sundered world as it was, beyond even the fact that he ached to tell everyone no matter how much They would punish him for his defiance, was a simple, brutally banal explanation for what had caused him to fall into this state.

Towards the end, they had both tried to make amends. However little.

Elidibus—Rafael, his father—had attempted to first incite some pity for his own choices. Hythlodaeus had brushed it off, had told the old man that he was insane and could plead as much as he wanted. In the end, he hadn’t pleaded. The Convocation and the sacrifices had passed him and the group he had been leading through the city’s serpentine streets to get out of this hellhole. White mask, common robes, his shoulder-length dark hair singed—and Elidibus, who had been leading the group further back into that hell had stopped for a moment, reached out and gone against his personal space to put a hand on his head. A gesture that only Ophion had done when he was younger, an affectionate and soothing pat as Hades nervously said goodbye behind them. “Fare you well, Hythlodaeus,” was all then-Elidibus had said. One walked out of that hellzone more or less alive, dragged after the dust had settled and the fires were quenched, by the few survivors of his group. The other became Zodiark.

He refused the Convocation time and time again. Although it broke his thrice-broken-and-glued-back-together heart beyond repair at the time, he separated from Hades and instead did as Alexis had done: he simply occupied a ruin he repaired just enough to watch what was going on. Perhaps an on-the-nose thing for a _Seer_ to do, but he watched in utter silence. He felt nothing as more people voluntarily went and gave up their lives to save everyone else’s, and the pitiful remainder of Amaurot were a people divided, although at first it escaped the Convocation. There were those that supported Zodiark at first out of their free will and because of His influence once they joined with the Convocation. There was the group that Hythlodaeus belonged to; people who had an opinion on this mess but not the strength to go with or against, people whose minds had shattered in part like Alexis, those whose wounds ran deep and recovered slowly, those who simply watched the world in exhaustion as to not squander the gift of life they had been given.

Then there was a group of people who planned what many saw as rebellion against the new status quo, as dissent, as unnecessary violence. As inevitable conclusion.

It was led by none other than the Head Mistress of Anamnesis Anyder.

The trail that the Convocation failed to follow past Hythlodaeus, the wayward Fourteenth, was the trail that led to another person who had a stake in opposing Elidibus and yes, indeed, the Convocation as a whole: his mother, Venat. His belief that a solution other than yet another deity could be found all aside, her presence alone would have driven him from openly joining the dissenters. Lacking his insight and due to their Tempering, they never quite figured out who precisely was behind Hydaelyn.

She had shook her head after all but cornering him mere days before Hydaelyn rose to oppose Zodiark, an almost regretful edge to her voice as she said that things could not be undone and words could not be unsaid, but she was fully ready to admit that she and Elidibus-Rafael had been woefully unequipped for both their relationship and their only child. All the horrible failings on her side considered, she held nothing but high regard for his stubborn defiance and the path he carved out for himself. It was, perhaps, the most genuine show of emotion for him that he had ever seen from her.

He stood in the streets staring up at the skies angrily but alive. She had gone and made herself the worst opposition to Zodiark, the heart of the entity called Hydaelyn.

The Sundering interrupted him trying to tell the furious Elidibus-Ophion, Lahabrea and Emet-Selch that he certainly was uninvolved in that mess.

On the lowest, most protected level of his soul, ran equal parts light and dark. Hydaelyn and Zodiark had fought their battle and their war. Hydaelyn won that particular battle and warped the laws that Zodiark had rewritten so painstakingly. In an attempt to one-up Her, He reached out and tried to temper the one person He knew She could never harm. She, meanwhile, tried to collect Her tribute from the victory. The one thing that ever eluded these two respected and celebrated prodigies of Amaurot.

Their child.

And thus, rather bluntly put, Hythlodaeus and the three furious people in the room, were spared the Sundering. Because of one last, petty, incredibly childish attempt to outdo the other that persisted even through the hiveminds they had become by then. After all, the hearts controlled the rest.

He, meanwhile, was spat out of the Sundering with his soul all but violated and pulled in two opposing directions. The other three remained dark-aligned because an additional Tempering could not be wove on top of an already existing one. By sheer bloody chance had he been the prize two Primals sought at the same time.

And by the gods that ruled this new existence, it was miserable.

Were he to support the Unsundered, he would have gone directly against what Hydaelyn desired for Her new world order.

Were he to protect the mortals and the shards, he would have wound up in direct opposition to the return to the status quo that Zodiark demanded.

Thus he was left to hang in the balance, strung up in the threads they tried to attach to him and yanked back and forth. He couldn’t stop his erstwhile co-workers from committing atrocity after atrocity in blind dedication to a deity that was wrong in every conceivable way. He could not rouse the mortals to proper defiance against these monsters that sought to see them all dead before long. He could barely make the strings move, and thus he swayed back and forth between giving cryptic advice to either side. A contradiction to the end, a true peddler of nonsense as a much younger Hades called him once in jest.

Approaching Hades and telling him that he was far from eager to speak with Her had been against Hydaelyn. Telling him that he was not going to speak with Zodiark had been against Zodiark.

They claimed their tribute as violently as ever, and once he found himself a new vessel posing as an adventurer, he heard the ridiculous claims that surrounded him.

Perhaps the historian had something to do with the sultana’s suspicious absence. Perhaps she had been poisoned as well.

But there had been no poison in his system, other sides of the argument on the Chocobo carriage he was on claimed almost defensively. It looked as if he had succumbed to an unknown but intense sickness, given how thoroughly rotted on the inside an autopsy had revealed him.

Whoops.

He made a mental note to take better care of body-upkeep whenever he was forced to next disengage thanks to violating both light and dark.

For now, a surprisingly quiet adventurer with ridiculously long dark hair and pale red eyes paid the people who owned the carriage their due fee and hopped off at Camp Dragonhead.

“Hey, ‘venturer! Ya never said whatcha were gonna do,” another one on the carriage said.

“Ah?”

“’s included in the fee to tell whatcha up to, youngling,” the man laughed and the person counting the Gil nodded.

Hythlodaeus let out a laugh that may have passed for a laugh. “Dear me, my apologies. I am on a quest, you could say. After too long apart, I believe I have finally found a group of people I have been looking for for quite a while—and I have an answer to a question they gave me ere we parted. It is high time I returned to them.”

* * *

He held several things close to his heart despite part of him wanting to violently throw some of them away. Some views of the Source were simply breathtaking and though he despised his situation once more singling him out from the people, he could easily put the view of Ishgard with the snow twinkling in the sun into the pile of things that were breathtaking.

Unlike Lahabrea and Elidibus, Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch approached taking vessels similarly. It were people with lofty goals and ideals that were on their way out of this mortal coil. With so much left undone, of course these people would agree to a pact with what may as well have been Amaurotine demons whispering promises into their ears. Such had been the case with one young Solus Galvus on the brink of death somehow winning a battle that wiped out the rest of his battalion. That was how the strategist of Xande went from good to blindingly excellent in aiding the would-be-emperor. It was how one historian who had been mugged on the street reached out with one hand to agree to having his body used in that way once he died as long as his dreams of compiling modern history for future generations was preserved.

The guard at the Steps of Faith was more than surprised to have the young botanist return unharmed despite his clear lack of combat experience and the reports of his caravan having met a similar fate elsewhere in Eorzea.

“It would appear that reports of my untimely passing were _greatly_ exaggerated, Sir,” Hythlodaeus said with a cheerful tone to his voice that was not his voice. He spoke with the voice of a dead man who had willingly given his flesh to a soul seeking a vessel. “I do admit that I got lost on the way back and found myself entangled in adventuring business for far longer than I presumed it would take me.”

The guard shook his head in amusement. “You ever were the person most likely to get lost and pick up another profession, boy.”

With that, he was permitted to cross the Steps of Faith that he knew would sooner rather than later be a battlefield to see the true end of the Dragonsong War come to pass. Currently the city lay quiet and surprisingly still for one that would soon lose its leadership in what many would perceive as a patricidal coup with little to no understanding of the true nature of their Archbishop.

His presence alone made the picturesque look of Ishgard seem like a bad joke. Even with most of his aethersight kept at bay, the light atop the Vault was blistering and sickly, evil in nature and a clear malevolent intent of keeping a status quo that would see regression rather than progress. Somehow despite their normally opposing natures, for once all three hearts that beat within him agreed on one thing.

That light shining up there was perverse and should not be allowed to fester any longer. The rot had not quite yet taken complete root in this city—it could still be excised and Ishgard as a whole could be given a better path to walk. One that would bring them back to extend a friendly hand to the skies above and receive a delighted roar in answer rather than a volley of flame and ice.

Future generations would reap the reward of the peace they could yet forge with the dragons. It was all mortals ever did—they sowed the seeds that one day the children of their children may reap the rewards. Such things the undying Fae oft agreed upon were both a mortal’s virtue and failure.

Finding his allies-yet-enemies would be quite easy, at the very least.

The distinct glare of fire flashing in the distance told him as much.

Hythlodaeus, however, idly walked past that and towards another destination.

* * *

Haurchefant of House Fortemps was currently busy speaking to the heir of House Haillenarte. While technically best friends with the youngest of that house, he had a favourable relationship with the oldest who was oft perceived as an oddity. Little did Ishgard know how much they would owe to the Houses Fortemps and Haillenarte before long; the former mostly with seeing the Dragonsong War ended and the latter with the immediate reconstruction efforts afterwards. The many futures his _gift_ showed him told him as much; in countless branches were the Firmament and the Skysteel Manufactory responsible for more than simply reconstruction. He waited outside for a moment for the conversation to move past a certain point.

Stephanivien de Haillenarte had finally won his father over with outfitting a brigade of commoners with firearms of his own construct and would see them instructed. Haurchefant Greystone meanwhile talked about possibly and very happily hosting one such commoner-drive battalion at Camp Dragonhead and perhaps could convince the other houses to let them attempt to reclaim the Stone Vigil and the Steel Vigil.

Hythlodaeus waited, then ruffled his hair. Then made certain it sounded as if he were running.

Made a point in skidding into the closed door, cursed it in the Fury’s name, then tore it open.

He was but another commoner to Ishgard, the guard knowing him all aside. It was not uncommon for one of these to look around with wild eyes, but Hythlodaeus had to play a part in this to a perfection.

“M-Milords! Pray pardon the in-intrusion—there is a fight outside the Forgotten Knight!”

“Not uncommon,” Stephanivien immediately said with furrowed brows. “Likely some drunkards—”

“It involves… a member of the Heaven’s Ward and my—I mean your house’s esteemed guests, Lord Haurchefant.”

The younger Elezen immediately paled. “Fury take me.” He shook his head. “Pray pardon me, I am afraid this does require my presence.”

“Worry not, old friend, I would have been rather offended if you had stuck to my side after hearing that. I will forward the suggestion to Francel and see if he has any interest in it. Now go.”

“Thank you. You there, you may stay with the Lord Stephan—”

“Fury, no!” Hythlodaeus shook his head. “I will accompany you, Lord Haurchefant.”

And with that, they were off. There were plenty of people muttering in the streets already, and it was rather clear that before long more curious minds would walk up there and get caught in the crossfire. Having watched the situation from afar for long enough, it was very easy to come to the conclusion that this Charibert was not threading along the border between sanity and insanity at all. In a sense, Hythlodaeus perhaps even envied the ability to go fully unhinged and set everything on fire so carelessly. After all, he was still bound by chains made of dark and light even as he followed Lord Haurchefant.

“Can you fight?”

The sudden question interrupted his thoughts before he could fantasise about arson-related blasphemy used against the order of the world as it was and as it had been before. “Uh,” he stammered and helplessly raised his fists while taking two steps at a time like Haurchefant was. “I… suppose?”

The bastard-born lordling at least seemed amused judging from the short snort that escaped him. “Well, mages are susceptible to a blunt pummelling. Alright. Defend yourself if necessary that way.”

He nodded and with that the knight unsheathed his sword and ran in asking the Warriors of Light if they were okay.

A fine mess was what he would have described this battlefield as. There were entire scorched parts of the stone ground that still had burning imprints on them. Young Unukalhai had certainly attempted to ice them over judging from the frost that was blazed across some burns and that tipped his staff. Elidibus’ mask had been half burnt off, revealing just how furious his expression was. The young Oracle had her daggers drawn and was fending off several knights who attempted to go for the weakest link in the party, Lahabrea. The Speaker himself was in a defensive stance and dumbly holding his staff—untrained mortal eyes failed to see what his gaze was focused on and the fact that his lips were not quivering but he was whispering several eloquently-strung together curses while draining the very life out of one of the knights going after the actual Warrior of Light and the Exarch who in turn were focusing on Charibert.

The only person to immediately acknowledge him was Emet-Selch, but the flow of battle prevented him from hissing anything into his general direction. It was, in a sense, a mercy, because he felt his own resolve waver just the slightest bit staring at the Architect like that.

It was a battle without a resolution, for the mage departed suddenly and very pointedly.

Confused, worried chattering broke out, with the Warrior of Light profusely thanking and even pulling the young Lord Haurchefant into an almost crushing embrace. He knew, of course, how that particular story ended in so many a branch that it was almost impossible for the young lord to survive.

It was Emet-Selch who broke the silence with a seething handful words that turned the attention to the both of them.

“And what, pray tell, are _you_ doing here?”

All the grand speeches he could have given. He could have said that both Venat and Rafael sent him, but he could not be so forthright without immediately risking his vessel being torn apart by the opposing deities laying claim to his soul.

He barely even mustered what must have looked like an idiotically melancholic smile judging from the surprised reactions from the unlikely alliance of Unsundered and Sundered.

“A story that you will be given before long—but there are more pressing matters at hand, Architect.” Emet-Selch took a small, confused step backwards. Ah. He had lost his usual edge to his voice, then. The apprehension of talking to a stranger wearing his once-beloved’s soul colours. “I have no intention of running this time.”


	40. ACT V: A Void at your own Risk, Part 5

Even through the sound of combat, she was listening rather intently to the background conversation. She had countless questions burning under her tongue, most of them half-remembered theories from Y’shtola and Urianger as they tried to piece the mystery of the Fourteenth who refused either side back together and failed due to enormous amounts of missing information.

The group had split up, with Estinien leading a group into the bottommost reaches of the Vault to free Ser Aymeric alongside Hilda, Haurchefant and Lucia. The Warriors of Light and the Architect’s suddenly resurfaced good old friend, as Emet-Selch had explained through clenched teeth, were left to pursue the Archbishop and hopefully managed to pin him down in the meanwhile for a thorough questioning. Meteor had gone ghastly pale, their eyes wildly jumping from their opponents to their supposed allies—for all intents and purposes, they fought a little more disorderly now with the Fourteeth along.

She had expected yet another Amaurotine mage despite vaguely recalling hearing something about him not being particularly in control of his powers.

She and everyone else had flinched backwards when Gerun—Hythlodaeus—instead delivered a punch to an opponents face that hit hard enough to bend their helm, sent them staggering backwards, and immediately followed it up with a kick that likewise bent metal and, judging from the horrendous crunching noise followed by a wet and startled cough, broke several if not all ribs inside that person’s body. Rather than two of them in melee range and five at range, it had suddenly become three and five and it made aiming for the mages considerably harder for the first few dispatched patrols that were clearly only here to keep them from progressing quickly. Once they all realised that despite everything, the Fourteenth was far from a sluggish fighter and most certainly outdid even the speedy Ryne, they went back to their usual routine.

It had been like watching Thancred show her most of the tricks she still stuck to and that she had made better, except the Fourteenth had no weapons other than his, by this point, bloodied knuckles. It wasn’t even _his_ blood from what she could tell.

Once the initial shock had settled and a first scouting glance shot around the perimeter to see if there were any of the Archbishop’s true underlings around, some sort of apprehensive if not angry silence from the Unsundered faded. But before either of the supposedly older ones could yell at what Ryne figured was the youngest, it was Emet-Selch who spoke first.

His voice had been uncharacteristically soft when he asked his first question.

“Why would you choose to come back to us now of all times?”

For a moment, Hythlodaeus had been quiet, his red eyes passing each and every single member of their unusual alliance. Then he shook his head. “There are certain things that have never come up or that certain parties are very likely withholding. Myself, of course, included. As far as withholding information goes none of us are saints, so perhaps the greatest of all sinners speaking first will break the silence in that regard.”

“There is more to this than you are saying.”

“Of course there is, Emet-Selch.” A kick sent another soldier backwards, which Emet-Selch’s abhorrent yet adorable Moogle-Egi followed up with a flurry of small magical blasts. “Has that not always been the case? Some hold more information than others, and the only way to make a group of people, even a whole society, work in unison is by being as transparent as possible wherever these discrepancies arise.”

“I do not care about these discrepancies. At all. Answer me honestly, Gerun—are you truly going to stay?”

There was a tinge to Emet-Selch’s voice that she had never heard before. It was so overwhelmingly melancholic that even the Exarch turned his ears slightly away from Meteor whom he was urgently whispering with. Neither of them of course saw the expression was just as melancholic as his voice sounded, and once more Ryne had to adjust her suspicion of how guilty and lonely this Ascian in particular felt through all his malicious playfulness.

“I am done running, Emet-Selch. Let that be answer enough for you for now and let my actions underline the truth of that statement.”

Another moment of silence, then Lahabrea let out a snort that may have been a furious snarl as well. “Let us cut right to the chase then, Gerun—that is an answer you have danced around for an age and a half. Was it your hands that saw Hydaelyn summoned or not?”

Ryne frowned at that part of the conversation. Hythlodaeus, she noticed, also tilted his head from side to side before letting out a long, strained sigh.

“I have never danced around that answer. I have been telling the truth from the moment you asked this: I have not so much as a cellular or aetherial shred invested in Her rise to power and the Sundering. If you would pin the blame on someone at random then you may, of course, but my conscience in that regard is clear.”

“If that is the case, might you finally trouble us with an explanation as to why you departed so suddenly after the Sundering?” Elidibus’ voice was as calm as ever when the hallway had been cleared of soldiers.

This time the pause was uncomfortable and she noticed that the Fourteenth was clenching his fists and grinding his teeth for a while, very likely internally debating about what to say. Eventually he shook his head so furiously that she knew the answer to that was not something he could say lightly.

“Later. When we are somewhere more… private, perhaps. It is not a light topic, and certainly upsetting enough to all present company that it would hinder our performance in combat.”

Lahabrea let out a dissatisfied growl and Emet-Selch a long sigh, but Elidibus accepted that answer with a small nod. “Very well.”

Surprisingly enough, it was Unukalhai who next spoke up. “Have you arrived at your conclusive answer, then?”

It earned him a surprised noise from two Unsundered and a small and _very_ exhausted sigh from the third. Gerun, meanwhile, tilted his head to the side. “Not quite, no. The more I pieced together, the less I fear I understood about the nature of the path.”

Well, that had been mighty cryptic.

The conversation died down as Meteor all but took off in an angry sprint up the stairs leading to a platform clearly meant for a priest of some sort to hold the attention of the religious. With little to no warning they all but jumped at the man clad in white armour there, a sudden fury surging through their body that all but made them stronger.

She had only seen that anger once—while they kept their exhaustion at bay and cut their way through the conjured horrors that had been made in the image of what befell Amaurot at the end of its days. Their fury seemingly gave them wings, and the all but loitering other seven exchanged a worried glance and took off after them with a cry for them to not do anything reckless.

* * *

By the time they reached the second man clad in white, Gerun winced and rubbed his eyes. It made Ryne wonder what precisely he was seeing—she knew the nature of their enemies, of course. By this point the entire Ward had been tempered by Thordan, no more than thralls bound by oaths they had sworn. Whether they had had good intentions or not was irrelevant for none of the Tempered could be reasoned with.

Or so the grand majority of Eorzea believed.

If these men ever showed a tinge of remorse for what they did, perhaps the Scions could have been clued into Tempering not being a final claim to a soul earlier than the horrendous incident with the Lord of Crags. But the Ward for all she knew never once regretted their choice and never once went against their tempered nature.

The Ascians she knew operated under different rules. Those of Zodiark had their free will in the most part, even if what they did in the end was for the good of the Primal moreso than for the good of Amaurot. Whether they realised this or not was irrelevant, but their somewhat free will meant they could be bargained with.

She pushed those thoughts away and instead blinked to see what precisely the Fourteenth had winced at.

She, too, winced near immediately.

Ryne had seen a similarly sickly light before, of course. She winced because it reminded her of the festering light of the Lightwardens in all the worst ways possible. The same light that had nearly consumed Meteor whole as they fought for a world that was not even theirs. Here on the Source, where the elements would only after the Dragonsong War start shifting ever so slightly towards light, the light that those tempered by the Archbishop bore was glaringly bright.

The fight itself was hilariously chaotic what with the second strange transformation of the day and the fact that she and Gerun now both occupied a similar space. For how fast and nimble he was, he was still a lumbering mass of Elezen limbs and clearly not yet used to his new body. Whatever the reason for discarding the old one had been, it certainly seemed as if he had not been in this one for long. It sparked her curiosity along with the questions that still burned under her tongue.

But much like before, it were others who spoke first.

This time it was the Exarch who threw the first stick into the fledgling fire.

“Pardon the likely nosy question, uh, Gerun, but there is something that bothers me regarding your previous refusal to work with either us mortals or your fellow Unsundered and your sudden change in disposition.”

“And as I said before, it is not something I can easily answer, Exarch.”

“Yes, you made that much clear. My question is about something you have said before—that you were done running. What precisely were you running from?”

The Elezen swept a leg out below the automaton, which interrupted it gathering energy to release it in a deadly blast. She would have to remember that particular leg sweep for later since it did seem as if it worked regardless of size or strength.

He let out a soft laugh and shook his head. “Zodiark and Hydaelyn.”

“But why?”

“Later.”

The Exarch did not seem pleased with that answer, judging from how he drew his ears back and narrowed his eyes. “There has to have been a reason.”

“Yes, there was. Is, in fact.”

“And you have no intention of telling it to us until later.”

“Yes.”

“You are aware that following whatever happens at the top of the Vault,” the Exarch said and apologetically flicked his tail towards Meteor, “there is nary a moment we will have on our down, correct?”

“I was not, but surely there is a long travelling period at any point that will cover this.”

A low grumble had been underlining this conversation from the start, but finally Emet-Selch let out a long, angry growl. “Dark’s sake, Hyth. Speak plain—you were running from Zodiark _and_ Hydaelyn. Is that the reason why you never once speak plain as well?” 

“… Yes.”

“Am I right to presume this issue that you do not wish to discuss mid-combat is related to the Sundering?”

“You are right, yes.”

“Will it answer how we escaped it unscathed?”

“… Yes.”

The Unsundered exchanged a glance that Ryne had no way of reading. She had always assumed that Zodiark had saved the four of them from Hydaelyn and that was it—what else could there be? From the looks of it, the other Sundered in this strange little group they were in also were rather confused by that statement. 

“Was it Zodiark, then?” asked Lahabrea.

“Yes and no,” answered Gerun while waving a bloodied hand through the air.

“Are you implying that Hydaelyn had a hand in this as well?” asked Elidibus with surprise in his voice.

“Yes,” said Gerun, a layer of frustration to his voice that had not been present before as he kicked the automaton hard enough that it fell partially apart.

“I knew it,” muttered Emet-Selch and shook his head. “Hydaelyn _did_ temper you.”

“….” Gerun merely raised a hand to his temples with a small curse.

Meteor, who had been listening and not said a thing other than the occasional profanity hurled at the soldiers they slaughtered on their way up the Vault, loudly slammed their sword back into its holster on their back. Seven people flinched and turned to look at them, and Ryne saw an expression on their face that she had not seen since the Scions had all little by little departed for the Capitol leaving her and Meteor standing there. 

That same grave expression had been on their face as they looked up at it while Ryne apologised for not being able to do better and wondering if fighting Emet-Selch was truly the only answer to this conflict. 

“C’mon now, smart guys,” they hissed, their blue eyes suddenly reminding Ryne of the utter cold at the heart of her own projection of Shiva. “Put the damn pieces together, you jerks. Or do you need someone to lovingly reconstruct what happened through half-gained knowledge, ‘cause I can do that while we bloody move as well.” They did indeed start marching, and the first person to follow them was Gerun. The rest followed awkwardly. “You were all in the same room when the Sundering happened, trying to squeeze information out of the Seer. Somehow, for some forsaken reason, you four and you four alone were spared. Except one of the four immediately leaves, but not after first claiming that what the other three were plotting was inhumane or insane, then suddenly doubling over with a headache and then saying that he was not going to interfere. Sounds mighty suspicious for someone who clearly never minces their words or changes their opinion easily.”

Ryne watched with awe how precise they managed to swing their sword at the next set of automatons despite talking. The white knight was severed in half by its vulnerable mid-section before it even as much as had a chance to scratch Meteor. 

“Ugh. Emet-Selch blurted out one particular thing of interest—the claim that you were tempered by Hydaelyn. Let me add a question to that table: was it _only_ Hydaelyn?”

The second automaton all but exploded under the combined energies of five mages, three of whom jerked around at that question to stare at the fourth Unsundered. 

His expression was blank for a long moment, and Ryne could have sworn that everyone’s hearts were beating as fast as hers in that very moment. 

Then, after this long moment, a lot of tension released from the Fourteenth. He let out a long breath that might have been a snort or a sigh or both at the same time and he uncurled his fists to stretch his fingers. 

His voice, however, was surprisingly cheerful despite the grim expression on his face. “No, it was not.” 

Urianger had posited that particular theory once. Only once. 

Despite everything, they had never once come across two Primals at the same time. He had wondered aloud in the Ocular what might happen in that event; more of a thought experiment thrown into the room while they took a break from experimenting. Beq Lugg had tilted their head from side to side as Nu Mou usually did in these situations, a deep rumble coming from them while he Exarch had merely shaken his head. The general consensus after a long and animated discussion of hypotheticals was that there was no telling of what may happen. Assuming that both Primals reached for the soul in question at the precisely same moment, were of equal power or the power imbalance was brought to an even playing field, there were simply too many factors. Especially, as Beq Lugg said, if the elements were in direct opposition to one another. Water would quench fire and leave only the water-elemental Primal in control. Water meanwhile would merely strengthen lightning, which in turn was useless against earth, which was corroded by constant winds that broke against ice, and ice in turn failed where fire began. 

Having someone get tempered by three double-elementals, or heavens forbid, six single-elementals, was a ridiculous chain of events that absolutely would never take place on the Source or any of its shards. 

Ryne had asked the question that made all three of them pause for a moment: what if it were Zodiark and Hydaelyn simultaneously? 

But that question was dismissed rather quickly; pure stagnation and rampant evolution pushed onto a Sundered soul would merely tear it to pieces and kill the Tempered before it had any chance to take root properly. An Unsundered soul was too much of a mystery to all of them still, although Beq Lugg and the Exarch both reached the same conclusion in that regard. It would leave a soul in constant conflict with itself and would turn its bearer into a living contradiction of craving violent change to return the world to what it once was while at the same time desiring the absolute stillness of this new world that no longer had people playing deities. 

“A living contradiction,” Ryne and the Exarch both muttered at the same time, clearly remembering that particular conversation in that moment.

Meteor pinched the bridge of their nose after smashing the gate ahead of them into pieces. 

“Good. One last question before we move on and _heavens, I beg you all, focus on the fight no matter what he says._ Hythlodaeus. It was Hydaelyn, you confirmed as much. The other party that lay claim to your soul at the Sundering—was it Zodiark?”

“I would like to throw one thing into the room ere I answer that. Going against the principles of either for an extended period of time or in a sudden intense burst quite literally kills whatever host I have. I would prefer if you did _not_ make me violently throw up my lungs any time soon.”

“Noted,” said Unukalhai.

“Thank you. To answer your question in plain words, hero… yes.”

* * *

Meteor had told her this particular story after much consideration. Thancred had told her time and time again that Meteor had suffered more losses than the Scions all combined, most of them so sudden and often brutal that they had never had a chance to truly make their peace with them. Wilred and Moenbryda, the rest of the Scion despite them returning later, Minfilia and Papalymo after finding them once again, countless nameless soldiers they struck up more than a plain work relationship with. The Exarch on the Source. Villains they were willing to give a second chance to that Ryne had not yet met, former allies who turned out to be traitors. 

Two losses that struck them rather heavily were the Lady Iceheart and Lord Haurchefant, both of whom paid a heavy blood price for seeing them unharmed or safely to their destination. 

She had begun to understand why Meteor had been so rattled when they arrived at Coerthas for the first time when they stayed at Camp Dragonhead awaiting permission to enter Ishgard. No matter how many times Lahabrea rudely brushed the man off, he remained friendly and cheerful to a fault, showed equal concern for all six adventurers under his care and made certain to talk to those that seemed under the weather. He even went as far as humouring her questions whenever he had not been busy. She had gained an interest in architecture on the Source since it was so much like yet unlike what she had seen in Norvrandt. Lord Haurchefant had explained all he could with his usual good-natured smile on his face and his voice carrying nothing but a cheerful tinge. 

She knew that this particular place was where a Tempered would attempt to snipe the Warrior of Light—any of them now that there were more than one, she presumed—to get rid of the problem. Rather than think about himself, Lord Haurchefant would stand between Meteor and that spear of light. Much like Moenbryda had made the decision that her life was of little importance next to a saviour of the realm, Lord Haurchefant chose to forego all caution to save his friend. 

It was a sacrifice that allegedly strengthened the blade of light, but as Meteor had admitted to her that evening, it but added to the voices that haunted them begging them to save this realm that they gave so much for. At this point in time not many people saw them as a living being—the Scions minus Minfilia and Yda had oft treated them as but a sentient weapon until Moenbryda’s death made them reconsider. The Alliance for the most part saw them as but a Primal-slaying saviour who had driven the Black Wolf out. Ishgard saw them as a stranger who could not be trusted. 

The sole exceptions to the role of seeing the Warrior of Light as a weapon to defend the people were their new allies in Ishgard and Dravania as well as Alphinaud and Cid. 

The group poured out onto the airship landing, with the group that had saved Ser Aymeric hot on their tails. 

The conversation that ensued went over her head for the most part—she did notice that Lahabrea’s face was unusually set and dead-eyed for once. She did know that this man on the airship had been manipulated by him and Igeyorhm in another time… and would be the death of the Unsundered. 

Meteor closed their eyes for a moment before turning slightly and gesturing at everyone else. 

Rather than a single Warrior of Light and Haurchefant it was six people the realm called Warriors of Light, one who hailed from a lost shard, and an Unsundered with no clear allegiance and Lord Haurchefant who sprinted forward. 

Meteor turned their head around just at the right time and dug their heels into the ground—Ryne saw that they would never reach the airship even if they started flinging spells after it now. A bright flash of light shone behind her and made all of them stop at the same time as Lord Haurchefant let out a strangled cry of sorts. 

Having learned their way with light and being much stronger than back then, Meteor had drawn their sword to use it as a shield of sorts. It was a breathtaking sight from where she stood. The spear of light hit their blade at an angle. At the same moment they heaved their sword upwards to deflect the shining line of death upwards while it still had momentum. It barely missed their face as they did so, their blue eyes gleaming in the bright light of the spear that uselessly deflected upwards. In the same moment a crack spread across their blade. With deafening finality their blade shattered not a second later, countless dark pieces of steel raining down upon the immaculate stone bridge they were on. 

Meteor collapsed to their knees with a wheeze—and all people on the bridge turned around and hurried back towards them, with Gerun and Lahabrea lagging behind somewhat as each and every single person clustered around the Warrior of Light. 

Ryne and Lahabrea both threw a glance over their shoulders to watch the Archbishop escape—her Echo was warning her that something was amiss and that something profoundly _dark_ was watching them. 

“Dammit,” hissed Lahabrea and drew a hand over his face. “She just had to go against her orders this one bloody time, didn’t she.”

She barely even registered what was going on any longer. All she knew was that they had substantially interfered with the timeline in this case—after all, Haurchefant was shaking their shoulders and was begging them to say something—Ryne knew that they were likely reliving these events as they had happened for them. 

But there was no blood on the pristine airship landing of the Vault this time around. The person who had been supposed to die here was still shaking the Warrior of Light’s shoulders with increasing panic in his voice. 


	41. ACT V: A Void at your own Risk, Part 6

The immediate aftermath of the Vault was… a mess, to put it simply. It had already not been pretty the first time around, Meteor recalled numbly and tightened the grip on their arms as the group marched out towards the Architects and the Last Vigil. A deep shudder ran through them. They knew they likely looked ill by this point judging from how worried both the Exarch and Haurchefant were while slowly leading them down the stairs while Estinien and Lucia had offered their shoulders to the exhausted Aymeric. He looked… more beaten up than he had been back when they had gone through this abhorrent chain of events in the original timeline. A small but concerning change that was worth noting.

They stumbled but Haurchefant reacted rather quickly and kept them from tumbling down the stairs.

Truth be told, their entire body hurt from deflecting that particular blow. They almost wished for Ardbert to start nagging them about reckless behaviour for the sake of others, to which they would reply that this was a case of yelling at one’s own reflection. But Ardbert was gone.

Ser Aymeric was rushed off to the medics nigh immediately, and Haurchefant _insisted_ on them being sent that way as well. When they refused, he insisted on at least having House Fortemps’ best medics look at them. They appreciated the gesture, truly they did, but if they got any more attention right now they felt as if they were going to throw up in earnest.

It was their unexpected eighth party member who cleared his throat softly to catch the Lord’s attention. “I do believe rest is all they need. While your noble house certainly would provide all they can to this particular Warrior of Light, perhaps it will not provide precisely the rest they need. As such, I would suggest that you fill in your lord father and the Scions while the Warriors of Light come with me to my place simply to get as much rest away from the high houses as they can over a single night.”

Haurchefant opened his mouth several times to try to think of a way to decline, but after a while he merely shook his head.

“Very… very well. I will see to getting the best replacement for your sword that money can buy, at the very least. Take care, my friend.”

* * *

As Hythlodaeus explained, he had no intention of keeping this particular apartment in Ishgard after this. His vessel was a dying Ishgardian botanist on his way to Gridania and the literal walking dead did certainly not require housing. They thought it oddly thoughtful as he cheerfully said that he was going to give the keys to someone in the Brume whose family needed it more than him. It was clearly just commentary to break up the heavy tension that followed the group around, and Meteor merely sacked to the ground the moment the door closed and crossed their legs with a grumble.

The Exarch followed suit and sat down on the floor next to them while gently brushing their arm with his gauntleted crystal hand. Emet-Selch grabbed a chair and, for the first time since joining their little group, sat perfectly straight and with a grim expression. Lahabrea leaned against a wall with his arms crossed and the annoyed twitch of his mouth giving away that there was yet another angry and childish breakdown was building up in that accursed head of his. Unukalhai and Ryne sat down almost simultaneously, both of them leaning against a different cupboard in the room and exchanging a small giggle of sorts. Deadpan as ever, Elidibus merely lingered somewhere in between that assortment of people, standing as straight as he usually did—concerning was the complete lack of movement from his side once he settled.

“Now then, perhaps it would be best if we addressed the Dhalmel in the room right away,” the once-elusive Fourteenth said, all cheer draining further from his voice with every word, “but I would prefer if we started with, mhm, exchanging information that has been withheld—given that I already gave mine away, how about the Oracle and the Warrior of Light as well as Lahabrea reveal their little trump card?”

Meteor and Ryne exchanged a confused glance. They had absolutely no idea what this Amaurotine wanted from them and judging from Ryne’s expression she was not entirely sure what he meant either. Lahabrea, meanwhile, went from his usual angry frown to a scowl with bared teeth.

They had observed him ever since they had managed to get him on their side. Emet-Selch had always and did still move as if there was a heavy weight on his shoulders that made him look over the atrocities he committed, most likely in a desperate attempt to get rid of said weight. Judging from the way he had presented the final days of Amaurot there was little room for interpretation—much as they were haunted by the faces of those they failed to save, it seemed as if Emet-Selch carried a similar baggage around; the sole differences between them were the deities that sent them forth and the willingness to walk over corpses to see their will done.

The Speaker, on the other hand, seemed to ignore that weight. He ignored a lot; metaphorically speaking he may as well have run around with his hands pressed against his ears and his eyes closed to his surroundings as he burnt the place down. However, it seemed that on occasion he removed a hand or even just a few fingers and cracked an eye open to look at whoever was speaking to him. More recently it seemed to have been Ryne, which in turn made them wonder—who had he been before the Sundering, or before the end of days? As more and more pieces of the puzzle came together, Lahabrea in particular appeared to have been someone fairly reasonable. Not a trait of that remained now that he stood atop the burning wall that separated him from his homeland.

It reminded them of Ilberd in all the wrong ways.

“Your bloody title, boy, ought to have been ‘Manipulator’.”

“Ah, while I do appreciate the compliment, you had better spit it out, old man, lest your title goes from ‘Speaker’ to ‘Uncooperative Chocobo’s Arse’. Besides, children do take after their parents, do they not?” The last sentence in particular had been delivered in such a deadpan tone that the Sundered in the room all had to hold back a snort. The Unsundered all knew more about that, of course, which meant they did not think the deadpan tone amusing.

“And why do I have to say things that you more than boldly hinted at, pray tell?” He very pointedly ignored the confused looks from Emet-Selch and Elidibus. “You chatter a lot for a dead man walking—why not chatter some more?”

“My, aren’t we prickly. Tell me then, Speaker, did you and the others ever learn who was to blame for the rise of Hydaelyn—or are you still stuck with haywire theories placing me in the centre of that blame despite a glaring issue with your logic therein? Or have you and yours ever considered the fact that someone else may have learned the answer to that question?”

Ryne’s eyes widened, and Meteor merely let out a long groan.

“I suppose being a massive pain the rear is Amaurotine standard and you all got ranked on it,” they muttered and raised a hand to rub one of their temples. “Well, whatever the results were, I am rather sad to announce that all of you are massive pains in ways my _unfortunate_ sundered mind cannot and will not comprehend. Yes, we know who is behind Hydaelyn.”

Something about the shade that had approached them and Ardbert at the time had been extremely odd. They reckoned that it had to do with the botched creation process, but knowing what they did now it was incredibly hard to see how they could follow that line of reasoning. It had been a paper-thin disguise and judging from the almost a little dangerous but triumphant grin Hythlodaeus shot the other Unsundered, they started to understand how he could have told them that there still was a way to prevent a transformation from happening and also that it was a good way of defeating Emet-Selch. A double Tempering that left him, for all intents and purposes, hanging in the balance… with the Zodiark side about to win it was rather obvious that the Hydaelyn side needed a push.

A push he delivered.

“The name means nothing to us, though. The more we tried to learn the more the answer seemed to elude us… just like the identity of the Fourteenth.”

His laugh was both melodious and somehow a heinous cackle that broke the silence in the room. “Oh, believe me, those two are irrevocably linked in ways I truly, desperately wish they were not, hero. If you would be so kind, who was in the end responsible for becoming the heart of Hydaelyn?”

Ryne crossed her arms. “An Amaurotine in Anamnesis Anyder called Venat.”

For a moment, the room was quiet.

Then the Unsundered all moved at the same time with a confused noise escaping them all. Lahabrea pushed himself off the wall, a wild look in his eyes as he stood there shaking his head. Elidibus completely froze up, the tense air around him seemingly starting to vibrate as he processed what was going on. Emet-Selch slumped forwards and buried his face in his hands, muttering something about this having to be a sick joke.

The fourth Unsundered tilted his head with his eerily cheerful smile merely widening. “If you had followed the trail further you may have found her as the root cause, but alas, you stopped at the lesser of two remaining devils as per your god’s point of view—Gerun, rather than his mother. I am rather certain that this explains some things the Emissary has been missing puzzle pieces for, but Speaker, would you please toss what you figured into the room so we can be done with this infernally exhausting conversation?”

Lahabrea said nothing, the wild glint in his eyes glazing over as he leaned backwards and started mentally running down some sort of list judging from his expression.

Hythlodaeus let out a long, weary sigh as he looked at everyone else in the room and then rolled his eyes. “Goodness, goodness. Leaving the explanation to the dead man walking, are we? I have not a clue what precisely leads to these events, but I know at the end of the line a certain Zenos yae Galvus, fuelled by something unreal and after being fed an energy source as well as information by someone I know not, attempts to do as the Warrior of Light has done—he slays an Unsundered. Too bad about that Unsundered being yours truly, for it activates a latent maternal and paternal instinct in both the Mothercrystal and the Saviour that makes them see red and blame one another for that outcome. Creation as a whole being a casualty in _that_ particular fight of theirs is an unfortunate side-effect.” He waved a hand through the air. “And make no mistake here. That is still the inevitable outcome should we fail to understand the root of the cause. Whether I die on my own or surrounded by people matters not. History demands its tribute eventually—if you wish to change it, the root cause is what you are looking for.”

“Well then, Seer, enlighten us,” Elidibus whispered. “What is the root cause?”

It was quiet for a long time in the room. Meteor was keenly aware of their headache by this point and the desperate need to sleep it off. The Exarch’s tail thwapping against the wooden floorboards alone was horrendously loud enough to near make their skull split.

“Truth be told, Emissary?” said the Fourteenth, all playfulness gone from his voice once again. “I have no idea. But I have a feeling that your approach to the situation—uniting us under a common goal—will lead us to that root cause eventually.”

* * *

They at the very least made certain to go to the Brume. Even if they had never met the man proper, Fray deserved to be buried rather than be left to rot.

Besides, they felt eyes on them. It would not be long before Sidurgu would come out of hiding after watching them for a while and then they could at the very least work towards making certain that Rielle did not have to live in utter fear for the rest of her life.

* * *

With so many adventurers it was easy enough to relegate some people to seeking out the Seedseers and rescuing Y’shtola from the Lifestream. Ryne, Emet-Selch and their latest addition to the group all departed for Gridania with Alphinaud and Tataru, while Lahabrea drew a hand through his hair and said that he needed to check something. By himself, he very pointedly added before departing without another word—Elidibus and Unukalhai wasted no time in asking the Exarch about the Crystal Tower and something about timeline integrity, which meant the three of them departed for Mor Dhona together.

Meteor, left on their own, put a hand on their replacement sword they had received from Haurchefant. It was fine Ishgardian steel that would last them just fine until they got their hands on something closer to their custom-made sword that they already dearly missed.

With a long sigh they closed their eyes and focused. They did avoid using teleportation unless it was strictly necessary to cross large distances, not because they feared getting mixed up with another teleporter or getting swept away into the Lifestream. No, they simply did not like the tingling sensation they felt every time they jolted back into reality in another place altogether, but this time it was very much necessary for them to teleport.

One moment ago they had been standing at the Ishgard aetherite plaza in Foundation, the general clatter of armour nearby as a small group of knights set out to take their positions at the Steps of Faith. The next moment when they opened their eyes again the soft snowfall of Ishgard was gone and replaced with the ominous crackle of a thunderstorm brewing in the Churning Mists.

The clouds were rapidly moving and the winds were all but howling, which gave the white stone of Zenith even more of an unreal look.

Haurchefant had been a heat of the moment decision. They had assumed him an inevitable death much like Moenbryda had been, and the ominous remarks about history inevitably demanding its tribute had made them worry about Wilred—but there was one person in particular whose fate they wanted to change no matter the cost.

Ysayle had come to Ishgard with them and withdrawn her heretics, but something told them that she had returned here to think about what she had learned in silence and solitude. Much like them, she was prone to brooding on her own whenever something upset her, and they knew that she would arrive with Hraesvelgr when they mounted their assault on Azys Lla with the imperials under Regula van Hydrus hot on their tails.

They slowly walked up the half-broken stairs and listened to the howling winds of the Churning Mists. With Nidhogg gone for the time being, it sounded as if the Moogles had grown a little bolder. In fact, they were fairly certain that the first deals to rebuild Bahrr Lehs together were struck between adventurous younger dragons and the Moogles who no longer had to fear Nidhogg right about this time—and with the return of Nidhogg as a vengeful shade, those plans would have to be put on ice until the inevitable end of the Dragonsong War.

They shook their head. Perhaps this success was what Francel eventually based the mentality behind the Firmament on. But for the time being all of that was in the distant future.

Right now they needed to focus on the figure who was standing all by her lonesome on the highest point they could reach without flight here at Zenith. The winds were all but tearing at her robes and her long, long hair, and she looked no less imposing in this situation than she had had back when they had encountered her for the first time.

“Ysayle.”

She did not turn around. “The Warrior of Light.”

For someone the general public perceived as cold, she had shown genuine fondness for each and every single member of their little travel group—even the less accommodating pricks like Estinien and Lahabrea were included in that. After the first shock about Unukalhai had subsided, Ysayle had been elated to find another Echo-bearer who seemingly had awoken to his gift as early as she and Ryne had had. Most people would have called it motherly without looking at it further, but just as she had with only Alphinaud in the past, she all but adopted Alphinaud as well as Ryne and Unukalhai as her younger siblings. It had been Ysayle and Estinien who, on separate occasions, all but taught Alphinaud more about the world through the eyes of commoners.

Ysayle had treated them all fairly and equally, had even given Estinien more chances than he likely deserved. In the end, they had come to an amicable opinion on one another despite the fact that they still rather enjoyed ticking the other off.

They opened their mouth to greet her properly and ask how she was doing, but they noticed her clenching her fists.

“I have been waiting to see one of you on your own. There is a question I did not get to ask—a rather pressing one, at that.” Her voice sounded… strange. Meteor tilted their head with a small noise that told her that they were listening to whatever she had to say. “You certainly know how I learned to summon Shiva, that goddess of my own making.”

She turned around, her expression lacking any of the warm fondness she had displayed throughout their travels together. It was like staring down the Lady Iceheart at the Akh Afah Amphitheatre all over again—a woman led by cold determination to end a war by spreading the truth that could and in fact would unravel many of the foundations that Ishgard had been built upon.

“Why, then, are you travelling with the selfsame demons that taught me the arts of summoning that goddess of my desires?”

A flash of lightning. Dull rumbling as the winds continued to tear at both of them, yet not a single drop of rain fell in the Churning Mists. It was a storm that merely raged, crackling even higher up in the skies, likely hiding Azys Lla just from their sight. They swore they heard a bit of stone rumble and fall somewhere nearby as well but they could not tear their eyes away from Ysayle.

Alphinaud had admitted he had loved her like an older sister, sometimes joking that perhaps Alisaie would have liked her as well. Meteor, too, had admitted that they had felt a kinship with her that made them wonder if she would have joined the Scions as another Echo-bearer like Arenvald and the other adventurers they had stormed the Praetorium with. Alphinaud had very, very quietly admitted that he still stood by the desire to make her a Scion once the situation in Ishgard had stabilised. Her passing that of course made any such desires moot, she was gone and there was nothing they could do other than ask the Mothercrystal to make her next life a peaceful one rather than one where she was brought to cold determination through the hardships she endured.

Right now, however, they were not entire certain what to make of her.

“… Excuse me?”

“Do not play coy with me, Warrior of Light,” Ysayle said flatly, unclenching her fists. “I thought the Echo was playing tricks on me at first. I believed that much until we reached Zenith, in fact. But there was a reason why the Echo was warning me that something dark was nearby nigh constantly. And after some consideration, I came to the terrifying realisation that the Warriors of Light were… not quite as light as I believed them to be.”

They straightened up a little with a long inhale but said nothing.

Ysayle’s expression softened into something rather upset. “They already toyed with me, despite our Mother trying to warn me of them. You, Oracle, Exarch and Comet are clearly chosen just as I was. But Emissary, Architect and Speaker carry the same dangerous aura to them that the Ascian who approached me and promised me that what I sought was attainable. I went against all my senses and the Mothercrystal all but begging me to run from this fiend, and I paid the price for it as you saw. What is it that they promised you to have you under their spell like this? Why would you give yourself to devils such as them?”

Meteor was not quite sure what answer she was expecting. Hells, they were not certain what answer to give her. They needed the Ascians—if they were to be brutally honest, they were the devil ensnaring the _Ascians_ in this case. After all the Exarch controlled the Crystal Tower, and the Exarch even minus his feelings for them was undyingly loyal to them. Without the Crystal Tower Lahabrea would be edging ever closer to cessation and Emet-Selch was sure to follow, and they were rather certain that Elidibus would have been ground to dust alongside the rest of creation as the two deities of Amaurotine make fought each other to the death rather than simply to prove their superiority.

That snare had apparently even drawn in the flighty Fourteenth now.

Ysayle, however, did interpret their silence as hesitation due to the Ascians having promised them something personal. Her tone was pleading at this point. “If they promise you to resurrect your dead loved ones, they are not capable of such a feat. If it is power they promise you, you already have more than enough to stand your own.”

Was she… was she truly speaking on her own right now?

Something about her tone reminded them of the Word of the Mother, and Meteor took a step back. That was nonsense. It was absolute nonsense—Minfilia had already been swept away and would become the Word of the Mother, finally capable of aiding the front lines better as she had always wished. They had tried so much to ensure that she knew her role was perfect as it was, happy to see her alive and well and with her usual paperwork no matter how much she wished she could have taken up a weapon to stand beside them instead.

“I… they promised me no such thing.”

Ysayle’s eyes widened. There was a small flash of fear as she, too, took a step backwards. “Are you… willingly consorting with them, then? Despite all they do to our Mother?”

Meteor shook their head. “The old saying goes that you ought to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

“Are you… saying that you are doing just that, then?”

They needed to choose their words very carefully here, lest Ysayle chose to misinterpret their intention even further.

Hells, even just her figuring out that there were Ascians amongst them made them wonder if Minfilia and Arenvald merely kept quiet… but then again, Minfilia had had countless opportunities to speak with them on their own—or had had just as many opportunities to reveal it to all of the Scions and the Alliance at that.

“I have no intention to give in to whatever they might promise me one day. It is an alliance born of necessity—so that none repeat your mistake. Or mine.”

The tension seemed to drop off Ysayle. “Yours?”

Meteor waved a hand through the air almost dismissively, a habit they knew they had picked up from Emet-Selch. “Mine is of no consequence to anyone but me, but it was a mistake regardless. I will not allow anyone to retread this path to catastrophe, no matter the cost. If I must thus hold hands with my worst enemies so be it. I know we are effectively strangers no matter how far we travelled together and started out as enemies, fair Lady Ysayle, but I beg of you: trust me that this is under control. The moment they stick a foot out of line the Ascians will pay dearly for their folly.”

She blinked a few times. It was clear that she was unconvinced—but at the same time she had seen who amongst the group the rest answered to. They had told her that the Ascian who had taught her how to summon her goddess had been slain and Ysayle was far from foolish. She heard the thinly veiled threat Meteor put into their voice.

Not against her.

Against their own supposed allies.

“I know. I know the Echo is all but screeching at you to run, run, run and never return. Believe me when I say I and Oracle, Exarch, and Comet all feel the same. But the path of a hero is… not always as straight a shot as you believe. The road to change, too, is twisted and forked and backwards all over.” Perhaps this was their chance to tell her that her death would not solve any problems she had not would it absolve her of her crimes. “Only those who live to walk it to the end can tell you how twisted and forked and backwards all over it truly is. Your road is a different one from ours, Ysayle. Very different. But… I would quite like to meet you once we both finish walking it. Separate or together, wherever the paths cross, I would like to hear your progress, and I can tell you ours. But you are… you are a comrade of ours. You are dear to all of us.”

Of all people it had been Lahabrea who had pinched the bridge of his nose while they waited for the manacutters to be finished and who then said that the Lady Iceheart reminded him of someone in both the best and the worst ways. While he refused to elaborate further, they had the sneaking suspicion that Ysayle and Igeyorhm were more alike than they knew—or perhaps Ysayle was the Source’s shard of the same soul. While they spoke as if they merely meant the non-Ascian members of their party, they could not help but remember that particular moment.

“… Will you be telling me the truth at the end of our roads? The full truth as to why you would invite your own enemies into your group?”

“Live and walk to the bitter end of your road, Ysayle, and I will. I swear upon the Mothercrystal that I will.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. The winds were still howling, the lightning was crackling wildly, and they still heard the distant rumble of dragons and the equally distant squeak of Moogles. Part of them almost feared that she would attack them now—she was as still as she grew whenever she called upon her version of Shiva.

An eternity passed in that single moment of waiting for her reply, and they swore they heard Alphinaud’s despaired sobbing aboard the Excelsior, heard Estinien bidding her farewell, even heard Y’shtola commenting that this must have been an impressive woman for her to elicit such a reaction from Alphinaud and them. They almost heard her voice in that chorus of voices telling them that they were supposed to be a saviour who saved the good and punished the wicked.

Ysayle said nothing as she walked towards them, every step she took echoing as if she was walking in plain ice. The click of her boots was like the countless rounds of cannonfire that waited in the future as Nidhogg’s shade descended upon the Steps of Faith once more, all of them silenced as they had yanked their lance from its holding place to challenge the shade once and for all with Hraesvelgr’s power and the chorus of voices led by Ysayle and Haurchefant at their side.

She offered them her hand. “You need not swear upon Her for me to believe you after so rousing and honest a speech. Swear it upon our shared powers that led us to this point. But I would like to hear your side of the story very, very much one day.”

They let out a small laugh as they took her hand and squeezed it softly—a gesture she returned. “And you will, Ysayle. I promise.”


	42. ACT V: A Void at your own Risk, Part 7

He had intended to speak with her like a civilised person—as civilised as an undying soul in a mortal body could be. Igeyorhm’s presence at the Vault presented a problem in more ways than one, first of all her knowledge that the Warriors of Light included the Unsundered. She still played her part as working with the Archbishop, which unfortunately would mean that they would run into her before long, but the Vault had been an instance where her being present was… too early.

He had given her the order to remain put until the Warriors of Light slew Bismarck and then snatch the key to Azys Lla from them. Due to his flighty nature Hythlodaeus would have been but an odd soul fighting together with the Warriors of Light called Meteor, Exarch and Ryne, whereas the rest that Igeyorhm would recognise instantly could remain away as to prevent her knowing things too early.

Any peaceful approach was immediately dashed by the icicle aimed directly at his mortal vessel’s head with the clear intent to pierce his skull.

Lahabrea, much to his own surprise, merely sighed loudly. “That is hardly how one greets their repentant elder wishing to give them the information they deserve, Igeyorhm.”

Dimly, dully, he remembered things he had long buried. It was an unfortunate side-effect of too much time spent in the same place with the same people, he presumed. He woke up staring at the backs of his hands once while waiting for these fools to arrive in Coerthas and fought the urge to claw the skin raw and bloody because suddenly he had woken with the clear phantom pains of scales on a body long-forgotten. He remembered the aetherial thrum of the lamps in the Words of Lahabrea as clearly as he remembered walking through these halls. While most were vague and fuzzy and _wonderfully wrong yet right,_ there was one thing that he knew.

That Igeyorhm was more dangerous than she let on when armed with proper knowledge.

It had been her _lack_ of such knowledge that had dragged an entire shard into a nightmare of uneven aetherial alignment and then plunged it into full chaos. The insight she certainly had gained to attack him now without a word was a danger to the Source in ways he did not quite dare thinking about.

“I had thought something was _off_ about you, but little did I know,” she snarled at him and he felt a clear pull at his infuriating mortal body.

Lahabrea drew a hard line in the aether between them by likewise pulling at the aether that made up her current vessel. In a contest of raw power he towered over her by virtue of being Unsundered, but she lacked the deep, seething exhaustion that still tore through every shred of his very being. Igeyorhm did not back off and Lahabrea also hooked metaphorical fingers into the sloppily divided net that was her sundered soul.

“You never were licking your wounds in solitude; you were consorting with the very mortals that drew gashes into your soul and that set back the Ardor by too large a margin, were you not? No, not merely consorting; the fact that you yet refuse to discard this vessel that outstayed its usefulness….”

He rolled his eyes. “The mere implication here is both childish and baseless and best left for petty gossip sessions rather than a conversation between two souls on the same side.”

“The same side, ha!” Igeyorhm clawed into this body’s aether and yanked, which forced him to withdraw his own hand to pull back what was his. Like a pair of aether-starved dogs they glared at one another before she continued speaking with her voice shaking. “Our Lord would never forgive any of you for letting yourselves be seduced by those thralls of Hers. It were your hands that awoke us once more to our true purpose—a purpose that you above all else are so dedicated to that the mere notion of joining hands with those tainted by the light would have made you _kill me for speaking such folly._ Yet here you stand, unperturbed!”

She let go of the aether she had clawed away, and the sudden lack of angry pulling left him feeling surprisingly empty. Just as empty was the stare he shot her, judging from her starting to bristle as if he had just spat on their Lord. Part of him felt as if he had.

Patience was a virtue he had all but forgotten about—and this Ascended had no memory of the life she had once had. Whatever had been hers was long lost to her no matter how many times she pestered Emet-Selch alongside the other Sundered because he eventually relented where Elidibus met them with silence and Lahabrea with cold fury. He may as well have been replaced with a stranger in her eyes.

“Words will not sway you, will they.”

It was not a question.

It was an observation.

Igeyorhm was strong-willed to a fault. She marched her paths to the bitter end, even if it was far from ideal to do so. It was her greatest strength, a strength he had borrowed from her specifically as all came closer and closer to crashing down upon them and they unearthed the truly outrageous parts of phantomology to see if it could hold back the swelling tide that would consume them before long. He had had his scruples. Too many, in fact. The clearest recently resurfaced memory he had shoved away was of himself standing next to a containment unit that shook and thundered as the creature within so violently tore at his aetherial restraints that he near cracked under the pressure. If this was what they were facing, was answering that measure of death and destruction with more death _truly_ the right answer?

That _thing_ the Fourteenth had spotted and wound up in hysterics over, that _thing_ that had killed too many of the elite team dispatched to see it caught rather than slaughtered and its aether scattered to the Underworld, that _thing_ that escaped and his fellows who lacked his expertise and his scruples made certain to _show him_ just how efficient the Zodiark concept would be at so large a stage.

Words had not swayed him after so many of his fellows died to see the concept brought to more than a theoretical stage.

Words would not sway Igeyorhm now that she deemed him a traitor or sick in the mind.

Her silence was icy—just as icy as the fog that spread.

Of course she had lured him into a place where there were more than enough beasts about that she could torment him to death with her faster reflexes and his perpetual exhaustion.

“Very well.” He closed his eyes. “I believe this is something that the Emissary would have wished to avoid—I certainly would have—but you leave me no choice. Perhaps it is high time I took responsibility for my failure as your instructor.”

The ground cracked.

A floating island that was home to but living sprites and beasts that knew no predators other than the ones that swam the Sea of Clouds was to be their corpse-littered battleground, and part of him sneered at her hesitation to take it into a bustling city. The Ascended were still Sundered at heart, and while some lost their consideration of the Sundered as living beings, Igeyorhm held it close to her heart. They were not all that different—it made her a manipulator outdone only by Elidibus, her subtle whisperings poignant and full of promise where he only sowed discontent and confusion about the path the mortals chose.

This island would sink into the Sea of Clouds, would crash down into the actual seas of this star eventually, and the aether-drained corpses of the present beast would vanish unseen. He reached into them and pulled, brushed past Igeyorhm who did the same and slung a ball of fire at the icicle she had tried to likely embed in his lower body. Sleet sharper than glass rained down upon him as he wove a whirl of flame into the air above him.

Of course, she had forgotten. She had forgotten his weakest point—but he had not forgotten hers. This pointless battle was but the two of them draining the surroundings of energy until the weakest point was open for a precise strike.

Thus, thanks to her status as an Ascended, she aimed for the wrong point. And while she tore at the aether of his face, yanked and clawed at it until his own soul desperately tried to fix this aetherial hole in his face, Lahabrea had all the time in the world to strike true.

The right side of his skull pounded but the lack of blood told him that she had tried to yank his weakest part out to have a place to strike. His vision was not impaired at all if he used the mortal eyes—his aethersight was a mangled mess with a roiling blind spot where his own soul tried to compensate for the hole.

Igeyorhm’s pull stopped when he drove his own claws straight through her weakest point—unfortunately for her, tearing through the aether around the neck usually left a person short of breath even if their body was unharmed. The aether she had gathered scattered in an instant, and Lahabrea slowly walked over to her. 

Phantomologists were not mobile attackers. In her eagerness to strike at his supposedly weak eye she had left an opening just wide enough for him to shove his own hand into her aether. She had her hands raised to claw at her neck, horror all but seeping through every little bit of sundered soul he brushed past.

“Now then, unruly child,” he said slowly one he stopped in front of her. “Were this Amaurot you would be getting a stern lecture on aetherially half-blinding your elders and accusing them of treason. This, however, is not Amaurot. Have you anything to say for yourself, Igeyorhm, before I create a vacancy on the Convocation?”

He gave her just enough room to breathe properly.

Just enough room for her to move.

Any other person would have chosen to whimper at this point, but mortals were nothing if pointlessly defiant. Then again—this was a trait they inherited from those that came before the Sundering. Attacking his newly created aetherblind side would have been a good move were it not so utterly predictable as her soul stilled in shock.

He held that pike made of ice she had tried to drive into his skull to wound his already stuttering own soul. It was furling and unfurling over the new blind spot to at least heal the wound—something that would take a few hours at best but was fully possible.

Lahabrea cracked a wide smile at her.

“D-, Student Eirwen,” he said with a shake of the head. “Underhanded, cowardly tactics can win you a battle but not necessarily the war. And the war, make no mistake, will continue—even if one has to feign loyalty to another’s cause for a while.” The Sundered never remembered. They would never remember. “Alas, you have failed your test. The price of failure… well.”

Part of him felt guilt as he dug his claws into her. Tearing things apart and returning their aether to the Underworld was something that sorcerers were versed in and something that every phantomologist had to understand as to avoid killing whatever they drained their energy from.

“Next time, follow your orders. Lest we repeat this dance again. And again. And again. As endlessly as you mortals retread your half-forgotten, partially-remembered original paths. Oh, and perhaps you would do well to remember to not accuse your comrades of treachery.”

He yanked. 

Tore her to pieces and scattered her upon the Sea of Clouds.


	43. ACT VI: Aetherlogy while Time Travelling for Dummies, Part 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: this being a pre-5.3 reveals written fanfic, i heartily acknowledge canon and will very excitedly implement it in future works
> 
> but for the sake of time travel au here, 5.3 and its reveals are hereby ignored so i don't have to rewrite almost 134,000 words.

When Lahabrea returned as late as he ever did, any conversation they had had in the rooms that Hythlodaeus would give away soon died down immediately.

It was an ugly thing, furling and unfurling like too many damned tentacles made of purely active aether, yet when he blinked his aethersight away he was instead greeted with the Speaker’s mortal vessel standing there slumped and in both excellent and horrendous condition all at once. Despite the violently lashing aether centred around the eye that Lahabrea had a hand pressed against, he managed to somehow stand taller than he had ever had since his reluctant agreement to join their side. Hells, Emet-Selch did not remember Lahabrea ever standing with so genuine a smile that bordered on insane on his face ever since the very day they marched into the heart of the chaos that was taking over their city. 

Ryne gagged before covering her eyes in the background. As well-versed as she was in seeing what normal mortals did not without ridiculous apparatuses, there were certain things that were less than ideal for a mortal to see—and clearly a bleeding hole in a soul like that was far from appetising for a young one who had, but moments ago, ravenously and happily devoured whatever latest delicacy the Warrior of Light had brought her in celebration of likely succeeding in steering a mortal Echo-bearer away from certain death. 

Throwing a small glance to the side—for the first time in millennia, no less—he watched their once-errant Fourteenth put a hand on his cheek and tilt his head to the side. Hythlodaeus caught the slightest gashes in souls and therefore could track attacks like these back to their cause; his aethersight was so fine that he had no difficulty discerning aetherial signatures between twins, something that even Emet-Selch failed at.

“That certainly is… something. Pray tell, are you quite… alright?” Hythlodaeus asked quietly, his red eyes narrowed slightly. It gave away that he was not worried at all and merely surprised at this garish wound.

Perhaps more shocking than his apparently half-blinded aethersight judging from the injury was Lahabrea’s next step of action. He had not said a word thus far and remained quiet even despite the inquiry. Emet-Selch felt like the hammer was about to be brought upon all their heads by the Speaker, who merely quietly flexed his hands—and certainly enough, three voices suddenly rose in a surprised groan. 

“Jerk,” the Warrior of Light spat out as they raised a hand to their head and fought to keep their eyes open.

“Oh no, no,” whimpered Ryne who slammed her hands on her ears, “please, no.”

Even through the clear agony, it was Unukalhai who squeezed one eye shut with an unpleasant expression on his face and yet remained eerily calm as he spoke. “I had wondered… what precisely was the meaning of… the Echo being inherent… yet refusing to show us your pasts. You control what we see… if it is in relation to you, do you not?”

And with that, the three Warriors of Light did no longer react to the Exarch’s panicked voice asking if they were alright.

Emet-Selch, Elidibus and Hythlodaeus remained to stare at Lahabrea—the strange searing tendrils were tirelessly working to sew the hole someone had torn into Lahabrea shut once more rather strangely obvious on his face.

“I am afraid I ran afoul of Igeyorhm,” the Speaker deadpanned—and Emet-Selch understood. That was not merely a strange injury. That was umbrally charged _living_ aether attempting to stuff a hole someone had torn into it; clearly the work of a phantomologist. “The problem has been dealt with, rest assured, but as you can see not without, ah, a price. It ought to realign itself before the alleged Scion returned from the Lifestream now gifted with aethersight and physical blindness arrives in Ishgard… Emissary. Is she the last,” he jerked his head into the direction of the Echo-bearers who groaned once again as they shook off their vision, “who has the chance to see what she is not supposed to see?”

Elidibus put one hand over the other at the table where he had been sitting the entire time. “Not quite, but the last of the Ascended. She was present at the Vault, was she not?”

Lahabrea merely nodded grimly and Emet-Selch wondered how he had missed that.

“She accused you of treachery, did she not?”

“She has been dealt w—”

“What in _all seven hells!”_ The Unsundered turned their heads to throw a glance at the Warrior of Light who had jumped to their feet with one hand on one side of their head and the other curled into a fist. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! Have you lost whatever small piece of your mind remains, Ascian!? She was _integral!”_

Hythlodaeus drummed his fingers on the table. “As was the young lordling’s sacrifice, yet none accused you of insanity.”

For a moment all was quiet.

The faint click of steel against wood made all hands turn towards Elidibus, who in turn had moved a clawed finger just enough to catch everyone’s attention. His voice was as calm and analytical as ever when he tilted his head slightly and spoke. “Exarch. Are we correct in the assumption that the course of history may have been altered significantly enough to be a concern?” 

Emet-Selch threw a cautious glance at the Miqo’te. For all his stern bravery in the face of history, there was something unexpectedly soft and tender underneath a crystal-encrusted shell. He truly believed in the good of people, in the righteousness of their cause. It was charming, almost, if it did not somehow wrap around to being hilariously naive. It made sense that another timeline’s version of him would have attempted to squeeze information out of the Exarch—but having the calm observation over a likely longer time period by now, Emet-Selch knew that this one would die with his lips clamped shut if tortured to the death.

The Exarch turned his head ever so slightly.

“I certainly altered the flow of history myself when I called forth the Scions on accident, but not substantially enough that some things went off the tracks. We may in fact _be_ off the tracks right now, but,” a swift glance at Lahabrea, who finally dropped the hand he had pressed onto his eye and whose aether seemed to rapidly realign itself now that he was calmer, “there is no telling until we encounter more differences. For the time being we had best proceed with caution but yet apace. Anything else would likely lead to… _complications.”_

The word hung heavily in the air while the Warrior of Light glowered at Hythlodaeus, who very much deliberately ignored the daggers they were glaring at him.

* * *

He stretched without a care in the world. “Marvellous—I could near trick myself into believing these are the Floating Isles of Atlantis, wavering above Southpoint Cape’s morning fog in summer. The climate fits, would you not agree, O Esteemed Emet-Selch?”

The need to kill time oft accompanied duties the Warrior of Light had, he had learned quite a while ago. While Cid Garlond was busy proving that he truly was a prodigy whose loss could easily uproot Garlemald in the long run, the Warriors of Light were left to run errants for the Vanu Vanu that harboured neither Tempering nor ill will towards them. How precisely he had gotten roped into this mess that sent them further along the road and off to completely different floating islands he did not know, but he was beginning to suspect the Warrior of Light in particular had set this up. Likely as exercise in torture—and by the heavens, they were succeeding.

Hythlodaeus was inconceivably cheerful for someone who might double over at the wrong choice of words because he had to adhere to two conflicting deities. All those visits to drop cryptic remarks had suddenly gone from uncomfortable and annoying to downright terrifying; there was no way his vessels survived for much longer afterwards if he spoke true.

And yet here he was, a spring in his steps as if the Sundering had never taken place and these islands were not the horribly paltry remnant of the very floating islands he was speaking of. The fabled underwater city of Atlantis had truly sunken when the Sound had reached it, its elaborate system of magic woven together with finely spun nets over glass shattered in an instant and its inhabitants were washed away by the unforgiving tide. Not even Zodiark had managed to fix this particular mess—after the Sundering a similar type of magic was found with the Sundered tribe called the Kojin, one half of its former inhabitants. It implied that there had bee Atlantean survivors who had managed to get by in the blank wastelands full of abominations… perhaps under the waves.

The other half of the people making up the majority o Atlantis had somehow turned into the very people now representing the majority of Ishgard’s population. He near _heard_ Mitron moan about how cold Amaurot could be when the seasons changed because they at heart remained an Atlantean Elf no matter how many millennia they spent in Amaurot. Which made Ishgard being an Elezen stronghold… tragically ironic. A people living in the depths of the ocean used to tropical temperatures whenever they went to the shore, now the isolationist mountain-dwelling people.

Hythlodaeus kicked a rock off the edge of the island. “You may speak to me, you know. Which I presume was the Warrior of Light’s intention when they shoved us together.” 

He merely shot the other Unsundered a long, blank look.

The irony of the situation did not escape him in the slightest—it had been Emet-Selch who had struck up their friendship by approaching Hythlodaeus because he noticed how the other Amaurotine stared at others. It was familiar but somehow rawer than any other person’s aethersight; he felt watched for every slightest step he took. Not even the slightest change in the aether seemed to escape those unwavering red eyes, and he had been _curious._

Now it played out like a complete reversal of these roles with the sole constant being that nothing appeared to escape Hythlodaeus still.

A long, long sigh left Hythlodaeus’ lips as he rolled his eyes. “Neither of us holds any love for the Sundered, believe me when I say as much. But not even you can deny the fact that they are sentient beings deserving of life—it bothers you by this point, does it not? The nagging voice that tells you that you have killed just as indiscriminately as the Sound has.” 

“Don’t,” Emet-Selch said and turned his back to the other. Of course a lecture. It only ever had been lectures with him ever since….

For a moment he thought he saw them all standing amidst rising smoke once again, with the whole cluster of people stopping next to a group on their way out of the city. He saw that hesitant hand reaching out for a rightfully normally hostile and averse to being touched other person. Most others missed the violent flinch in Hythlodaeus’ soul as his father said his name and bade him farewell. They did not see the defiant fear in his eyes as he watched the group marching alongside the Convocation vanish.

“Oh my, oh my. And here I thought you had lost your scruples after the third massacre—first, by their reckoning.”

He narrowed his eyes but did not turn back around. “I do wonder, do you count the Thirteenth in that tally or not? Because any light attachment I felt for the most part did quite die out with the _fourth massacre_ and has yet to return. This is but a means to an end.”

It was a startling revelation that Hythlodaeus considered the summoning and strengthening of Zodiark _massacres._ The Thirteenth they all thought about the same, and the first Calamity naturally was such as seen from an observer’s point of view. Hythlodaeus rolled his eyes. “You just keep on telling yourself that, Emet-Selch. We will certainly know when it breaks your back.”

“Alright, that is quite enough out of you, you arrogant arse—as if you are innocent in this equation. Unique circumstances completely notwithstanding; if I am the butcher of the masses then you are complicit through inaction, Seer.”

“Ahaha. Outstandingly bold of you to presume that I was _excluding_ myself.” He accentuated that statement with an obnoxious little twirl and shot him a taunting grin that truly made him look like a predator ready to pounce on its prey. Emet-Selch blankly stared.

This was starting to give him a headache. He did not swipe for the low-hanging fruit Hythlodaeus left him—if he had ever learned anything about this Amaurotine in his life then it was to not engage his jabs if he acted like this.

* * *

“Hmm,” the Scion said and turned her head from side to side.

The key to Azys Lla, as it turned out, was destined to fall into the Archbishop’s hands. Rather than having Igeyorhm step in to tear the thing out of the Warrior of Light’s hands while Garlond was unaware of what was happening on the island he was rapidly pulling back towards the main chunk of floating land it was the would-be-murderer of that lordling who all but swept in and quite literally swept them off their feet. Perhaps it had been an attempt to toss more than one of their merry group of eight off the island but the only ones that came close to the edge were the Oracle and the boy; both of which reacted with alarming speed for mortals. One rammed her daggers into the chunk of earth and stone they were standing on to stop herself, the other slung an aetherial lasso around the Emissary and pulled himself close to the Ascian.

The Warrior of Light dropped the key they had picked up, the Archbishop meanwhile dropped his speech on Azys Lla, Garlond gave chase and failed, and thus they returned to Ishgard with empty hands and empty heads. The Scion then suggested that Azys Lla’s shield could be breached and that she knew someone who might have an inkling as to how to build what Garlond suggested. 

She had already been rather sharp before any of this, but the fact that she was quite literally willing to shorten her lifespan just to _see_ was both imposing and hilarious. 

“Architect.” Of course she would turn to the closest one, which unfortunately was him.

Their travelling gaggle was almost comically large by now, with Hythlodaeus, the Oracle, the Scion Alphinaud and Unukalhai leading them down the paths that led to the Dravanian Hinterlands. Whatever conversation they were having, it was rather animated and seemed to be in good spirits. Almost comically dark in comparison were the Warrior of Light, Elidibus, Lahabrea and the Exarch, a dour mood hanging over them like a cloud. The Warrior of Light in particular had been in a positively abhorrent mood ever since Hythlodaeus had correctly pointed out that Lahabrea had not been the only one to meddle with timeline integrity. Lahabrea’s loopy mood had not stabilised the slightest and the sway in his steps could easily be mistaken for the same swaying that people in a good mood or suffering from intense bouts of dizziness did. Elidibus and the Exarch, true to their disguise as twins, made certain to walk between the Warrior of Light and Lahabrea.

And the rear was in control of him, claiming that he hated traversing mountain paths and Scion Y’shtola had not quite gotten used to walking around with only aether to guide her and therefore walked slower than the rest.

“….” He made a non-committal sort of grunt to let her hear that he was listening.

She crossed her arms. “I know quite a lot of time has passed in the meanwhile and that things certainly have changed for both you and I, but there are some things that I simply cannot make sense of.”

“Oh, believe me when I say you are not alone. But feel free to ask. Perhaps I can clear up some of the mental murk for you.”

Aethersight was one hell of a thing. Mortals would feel as if they were being watched despite the person in question being blind, but Emet-Selch was perfectly aware of how intensely she was staring ahead at the rest of the group.

“I will not question… Comet and Seer, you said? Unexpected though they are, so were you and Speaker. Doubly so since it appears that Comet worked with Speaker and Seer with you.”

He very desperately wanted to tell her that he was not involved with _Hythlodaeus._

“My first question concerns Speaker. While I am glad to see that he heeded my _request_ to rest, I cannot help but notice there is something _amiss._ As if part of his aether is _missing,_ but it is not causing him any troubles. You seem to know a thing or three about aetherlogy; have you any idea what this deep, dark puncture is and what may have caused it?”

Emet-Selch sighed and shrugged. “Hells if I know. He seems intent on taking that little secret with him to the grave I will personally kick his corpse into, but I presume it is linked to how the Archbishop claimed that he was approached by Ascians. Speaker is vengeful enough to run, gather enough aether while we are not looking and attacking an Ascian like an unhinged monster.”

Y’shtola blinked. “I….”

“Of course, there is no telling. He may simply have run into a Voidsent and is too embarrassed to admit it. As long as it causes him no trouble, why should we worry?”

“… That is a fair point. The next question I have concerns Meteor. While I truly believe Speaker to be positively insane with the good of the realm at heart, something about Meteor has changed drastically in the meanwhile. They were nowhere near as brooding and gloomy as they are right now. Has something happened?”

Elidibus had already had to handwave a similar question. Emet-Selch closed his eyes and shook his head. “Old, personal trauma resurfacing recently through several causes that no one has any control over. They are fine. Or will be fine once they make their peace with it.”

“And the seething anger aimed directly at Seer that I seem to be picking up on?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Seer can be rather… direct at times. Brutally and unapologetically so. Whilst the Lifestream threatened to whisk your very essence away on its currents, Seer and Meteor had a… mild disagreement. Stubborn as they are, however, reconciliation is currently out of the question unless one relents.” 

“Does this correlate with Meteor’s current disposition?”

“Somewhat, albeit the overlap is a much smaller margin than you would believe.”

“Understood. Final question while I think about the rest, and unrelated to what has been on my mind of late: how come no one ever invited you to Sharlayan? Or were you the student of one who remained on the continent rather than follow the exodus?”

He could not help but snort at that. Mortals, ever so simple-mindedly idiotic in their perception of the world. As if Sharlayan were the only people capable of understanding aetherlogy. While certainly the leading experts just as Amaurot with its title as City of Scholars had been, it did not mean that any other schools or understandings were incorrect or lesser. Understanding theory did not make a master, and neither knowing how to control it without understanding the principles. That had ever been the one mantra that had once driven Lahabrea, faded and buried under guilt and anger as it was—and he of course had not earned his titles without merit.

Hythlodaeus was the living example of knowledge not making a master; while he very reverently listened to each and every foreign dignitary, while he departed often without warning and without a return date to wander the world in search of more useless knowledge to hoard, the fact that there was a clear disconnect between his desire to understand and his desire to control.

And thus, he shrugged with a laugh—one that evidently startled the Scion. Her ears twitched up and her tail lashed, unusual for the normally so controlled Y’shtola.

“Alas, I fear I must disappoint. I am Garlean born and raised despite any… moral discrepancies my family had with Emperor Solus’ claims of Garlean lineage being desirable.” Ah, the irony tasted was both sweet and laced with poison. It bothered him by this point, Hythlodaeus had been absolutely correct. “What I learned, I learned from loaned books and overheard conversations on my travels. I have not been to Sharlayan nor have I ever had the pleasure of meeting a Sharlayan proper before the very day my pursuit of knowledge drove me right into your dear sister’s arms.”

Y’shtola nodded, but he could not help but wonder what precisely was going on in her head.

Little by little, the picture became clearer. He was starting to understand how precisely the Scions had managed to slaughter the Ascended and even the Unsundered—and once more he wondered if the Sundered he had been looking for had been under his nose the entire time.


	44. ACT VI: Aetherlogy while Time Travelling for Dummies, Part 2

“Move it, move it, _damn you!”_

Sharlayan defence mechanisms had always been… odd, to say the least. Perhaps it was due to the eccentricity of Sharlayan as a whole, or perhaps it was their own little brand of megalomania—but automated defence mechanisms, often capable of weaving some sort of spell, were ever the latest rage and in use for anything that warranted protection to the slightest degree in the eyes of its owners. Of course it usually led to some automaton hunting down a supposed thief with relentless abandon—he himself had been the victim of that more than once while simply trying to grab a book from a shelf.

This one, however, had been clearly designed to absolutely vanquish sole would-be thieves while also being capable of confusing smaller groups enough to gain an advantage.

Not to mention the Voidsent.

In fact, this entire bloody library seemed infested by them, and the Exarch did wonder if this automaton was still _truly_ an automaton or perhaps possessed by a Voidsent.

Meteor had grabbed him by the hand and pulled him along to stomp through a summoning circle; fragile as the spell was it shattered under their feet. Ryne bounced back with Unukalhai grabbing onto her with another aetherial lasso of sorts, citing that it was easier to move around and quicker no less.

Their grandiose Unsundered party members were where the plan started falling apart. Emet-Selch and Lahabrea wasted no time in turning into different directions despite standing next to one another and therefore loudly smacked into one another. Rather than see the spells shattered they instead started a verbal match in Amaurotine that included several words that made Meteor dig their clawed gauntlets further into their head. All in the meanwhile, Emet-Selch’s little Egi which had been unceremoniously dubbed ‘little shite’ by Meteor, continued thwacking the keeper of the basement gleefully with some chirps and squeaks that sounded more like a bad parody of a Moogle’s kupos.

Elidibus appeared to be struggling—perhaps it was his being better suited for tactics than combat, but he seemed dazed after failing to run away from the distinctly glowing orbs that spelled doom, and currently appeared to be debating whether to _screech_ at Lahabrea and Elidibus to get their act together or to simply lay down and admit defeat.

And last but not least, with a bemused, cocky grin on his face and far, far from being either a help or a hindrance or _even involved in combat at all,_ stood Hythlodaeus with his arms crossed while watching this nonsense unfold.

“Alright, that’s enough of that,” growled Meteor and grabbed him by the arm. They _ran,_ and it would have not surprised him the slightest had each of their furious steps shot sparks up in the air. Alas, it seemed as if Unukalhai remained the only one capable of doing so, and the Exarch stumbled along as they both ran past the bickering Ascians, shoved the dazed one aside, and stomped on the summoning circle that had been unattended for nearly too long. Ryne and Unukalhai also started moving—but too late.

For a moment, all stood still.

Then, immediately, aetherial blades cut through the air, and Meteor let out a guttural growl that made them sound more like an animal than a human—and they had a glare to match. Those piercing blue eyes of theirs could have _killed_ in that very moment as they stormed forward, bowled over Lahabrea and Emet-Selch, let go of his arm, unsheathed their sword once again and did a forwards flip to cleave the Voidsent in twain. It had always been bizarre how fluidly they moved in combat; bewitching at worst even.

Simply following them through the Crystal Tower at a safe distance had already shown him that they had been more than outstanding with an axe in their hands. In combat they had seemed as if they had been one with the very weapon they wielded, the slab of sharpened, weathered steel a part of their body rather than simply a tool. During the calmer times researching Allagan texts and looking over trinkets at Saint Coinach’s Find, back when they had worked side by side, they had almost casually said that they, too, used a bow in the past before an axe seemed to be a better idea after certain events had taken place. He had never asked about it properly but he had always suspected that they had traded their bow in for an axe following the events at the Waking Sands, and true to their word they managed to unleash a volley of deadly arrows in so short a time he had to wonder if they had been born with a weapon in their hands.

Just after cleaving the thing in two distinct halves that erupted into a miasma cloud of foul aether, they carved a half circle into the ground below their feet and—in the nick of time—blocked a blow from the guardian.

By now, even the more useful members of the party were mesmerised, seven pairs of eyes tracking this elaborate dance that had not only bewitched his younger self but also won wars that had seemed impossible to win. It seemed as if they did not waste a single movement, using their weight and strength with every blow to move either themself or their opponent; they wasted not a moment to hesitation. Glinting steel, dully shining armour—and an expression that was naught short of the rage of combat.

It made sense why they were called a one-person-army, how they all but swept through countries and their wars and emerged victorious.

* * *

“We’re missing bits and pieces of the story,” Meteor eventually said and their shoulders slumped.

Getting ready for departure had them say that there was something they needed to do, and thus the Exarch and Meteor had wound up once more prowling the crystalline halls that had been his home for so long. There was something weighing on their mind that had made them jumpy, antsy, angry even, and hearing those words made the blood in his veins run cold.

“Missing?” he repeated dumbly.

“Upon arrival—and the return from slaying the Primal—we were supposed to meet not only an imperial legion but the new emperor himself along with the legatus. Yet we not as even so much as caught a _glimpse_ of Emperor Varis and Legatus van Hydrus. I assume this links directly into how Igeyorhm’s premature demise and… and….” They dragged a hand down their face. “Links directly into who died and who lived compared to the actual events. I cannot make sense of it. And with them missing, I cannot even be certain that we will be trailed by an imperial airship in the first place. This is… not good. Or at the very least not inspiring much confidence, Raha.”

The Exarch tapped his crystalline fingers against the table, dimly recalling that it had all but been forced upon him by the first people of the Crystarium when they saw there had been nothing of the sort in the tower. Its aetherial structure seemed so brittle now that he had gotten used to the Source once again, the claim that Rejoinings were reinforcing the Source’s structure confirmed with this plain table.

“I had no idea you encountered Emperor Varis that long before the supposed peace conference amidst the rising war in the Ghimlyt Dark.”

“History books made no mention of it?”

He shook his head slightly. “Certainly there must have been an account somewhere, but I do not entirely recall hearing it before. I know that imperials tracked the Excelsior’s maiden flight which led into the demise of Iceheart in a sacrificial bout to see you safely to Azys Lla, but I had no idea that the reason they were tracking you was… what, exactly?”

Meteor closed their eyes. “Conquests, I presume. It would be hypocritical of me to claim that the details were not escaping me right now. It was only thanks to Lucia that we were able to escape the second time—she and her timely intervention and her confession that she once had been a Garlean spy.”

“… Which means her revealing her past is another thing to be added to the ‘missing or changed details’ column. The differences between the original timeline and the current timeline are starting to pile up rapidly, now that you mention it….”

He threw a curious glance into their direction when they let out a defeated sigh. “Was it my choice to see no blood spilled at the Vault that day that set us adrift on the currents of time, then?”

The Exarch shook his head. “I do not believe us _adrift._ We are merely encountering changes based on our actions—you cannot entirely blame yourself for anything but what the still living Lord Haurchefant does. The Ascian Igeyorhm was under Lahabrea’s command at the time; a command one cannot control over a long distance. Him running, ah, afoul of her as he said speaks of a rift between the Ascended and the Unsundered. A rift we can notice between young Unukalhai and the Unsundered. With all that has been set loose somewhat, I believe a proper culprit for our missing emperor is… the Fourteenth.”

Meteor straightened back up with their face scrunched up in thought.

He remained quiet for a while as they tried to figure out what he was implying, and eventually gave up with a shake of their head. “Elaborate?”

He got up and tapped his staff against the floor. While not the Ocular’s system, there were plenty of screens that served other purposes inside the tower. The one in this particular room was more like a drawing board, one that showed everything he bade it show within a matter of heartbeats.

He carefully constructed a representation of the timeline that Meteor and history recalled, and then slowly added to what had happened thus far. Meteor stood beside him with their arms crossed and nodded once he finished.

“Mind that a lot of this is purely conjecture at this point, but I believe that quite a lot of the events in the first place where somehow kept in motion by the errant Fourteenth. While he cannot _set_ them in motion as per the conflicting desires of two Primals, once it is in motion he can sweep things along or out of the way assuming it is not utterly breaking his supposed duties. Hence why he is currently able to simply follow the flow along with us; we are not exactly on Hydaelyn’s side nor are we harbingers of Zodiark. A grey area, in a sense, between light and dark. Taking the missing Lucia and Emperor Varis into account, perhaps they would have never been then and there,” he pointed at one of the most recent points on the lower timeline, “even in the original timeline. Assuming, of course, there was nothing to sweep them along into action faster than presumed. We deal with an Unsundered more flighty than Elidibus, the Emissary whose subtle manipulation eventually saw support for you break away slowly. An Unsundered who owes allegiance to both and neither side of the conflict certainly would choose to spur either, our enemies as well as our allies. Thus, somehow, he both ensured that Emperor Varis _and_ Lucia were present on the same fateful day in the Sea of Clouds.”

“Mhm. I see. You mean to say with him… rooted, for a lack of better words, and firmly attached to our side, there was no encouragement for either party to truly come to the Sea of Clouds. Lucia will likely still reveal her former allegiances, and… oh no.” They uncrossed their arms and pinched the bridge of their nose. “Oh, this bodes well.”

He tapped the staff on the floor once more to dismiss the screen back into inactivity. Tilting his head, he repeated what they had said earlier. “Elaborate?”

“Get the screen back up, Raha, please. But only the old timeline, and extend it a little—I can manipulate that thing, can I not?”

He nodded and did as they asked.

They did not add much. After the return from the Dravanian Hinterlands they added a little cross on the timeline. From that cross they arched an arrow to another point which itself led to a circle they then labelled ‘Defeat of Thordan’.

“Okay, let us assume we are in the original timeline. Cross on the line is where we are—about to bear witness to the first flight of the Excelsior and the subsequent demise of Ysayle. The circle is as it says, the defeat of the Archbishop and the rise of Nidhogg’s shade. Which, as you know, as a sequence of events also includes the demise of Lahabrea and Igeyorhm, but that is irrelevant.”

“You mean the point to which the flight of the Excelsior leads?”

“Exactly. There are four distinct parties in Azys Lla at the height of these events. Two are allied; the Archbishop and the Heaven’s Ward are technically still allied with the Ascians at this point. The fourth party is us—the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, the Garlond Ironworks and the Azure Dragoon of Ishgard. Once the conflict resolves, two parties remain in Azys Lla, with a third having a minor stake in the race. One party that remains are the Scions alongside the Ascian’s minor stake. A failed Warrior of Light named Unukalhai who hails from the Thirteenth reflection.”

He blinked a few times, slowly starting to understand. “The third party and the one that remains after the conflict between the other three resolves… is the VIth Legion under Regula van Hydrus, is it not?”

“Yes. After Ysayle’s demise, the Garleans crashed elsewhere in Azys Lla and immediately set up a camp there. It just so happens that they did land in what may have served as base for their imperial castri, making it extremely fast and extremely easy to set up camp. The legion and its legatus, however, sought Azys Lla as a means to understand the technology used to bind Eikons. After all, Azys Lla is home to the tribe that summoned Bahamut as well as the shackles that bind the Warring Triad of Meracydia. If, as you claim, things happen eventually anyway if they are meant to happen… does that not imply that not only will we run into van Hydrus in Azys Lla but Emperor Varis as well? Assuming, of course, it is meant to happen?”

It brought all those countless hours they had spent hunched over history books in a forsaken future back to his mind with almost painful clarity. They had used similar timeline configurations and had painstakingly pieced history together. His startlingly early vanishing point on that timeline meant that he was perfectly capable of supplying the Warrior of Light’s history up to a certain point—remembered bits and pieces they had told him while the candles in his tent flickered and the documents they had been hunched over laying forgotten.

After the point where the Crystal Tower closed its doors for 200 years they all relied on history books, on spoken accounts and notes left by the people who worked on the theory of averting a Calamity.

Not only had they been searching for a proper alignment point, they had also tirelessly worked and worked to see what was integral, no, what was _fated_ to happen. It had been a horrid business, seeing as they were deciding the lives of people that meant so much to others. But soon enough they realised that at points the Warrior of Light would have simply not been strong enough to work for anything but their own home. A home that was torn from them as their allies scattered and they assumed their name slandered beyond repair. It was in Ishgard that they learned the harsh lesson that sometimes in order to protect one thing they needed to sacrifice another. A lesson that was so integral to their strength as the Warrior of Light that they were unable to ease that pain.

“Besides,” Biggs had said quietly and shoved a document penned by Cid Garlond himself into the centre of the table, “there is still the theory that time itself opposes changes and seeks to return all to its proper course, as seen with the Primal Alexander’s self-termination sequence involving several stable time loops and the like. But even a stable loop has ways out should one make the wrong decision, and keeping track of that will be hard even with all preparation under the sun. Or so the Founder posits in this theory.”

Perhaps they had accidentally found a way out of what ought to have been a stable loop.

But there was no way of telling.

“We might,” he said quietly after a while and closed his eyes. “We might not. Your knowledge of how things are supposed to go is going to be important from here on out, I fear. But it is best if we approach this with a level head.”

Meteor closed their eyes with a groan. “Not much longer. Not much longer and we can likely pre-emptively nick the problem in the bud.”

After all, with the end of the Dragonsong War looming ever closer there was the incident at Baelsar’s Wall waiting just beyond.

* * *

“Emissary seems unwell,” Lord Haurchefant remarked, the group gathered here at the airship landing massive according to Meteor. They had been holding his hand for the better part of the time that had passed since they returned, a surprising show of vulnerability that they normally avoided showing. But they had left by this point, asked to come away by Urianger and Y’shtola to discuss something meant only for their ears, or at the very least the ears of the Warrior of Light who seemingly led the others.

True to the lord’s observation, Elidibus had slunk away from the group and all but collapsed onto a railing. From far enough away it looked as if he were merely leaning down and enjoying the view, but the closer he got the more obvious the unwellness became. Drooping ears and a drooping tail, and effectively no tension in his body at all. At the very least he seemed to be more than capable of upholding the glamour that changed his eyes from a telltale Allagan red and green—while the currently present Scions were unlikely to recognise a Student of Baldesion by the eyes alone, Elidibus had also glamoured the marks on the Exarch’s younger self’s neck away. If the changed eye colour broke the Archon tattoos were surely to reappear not long after.

He quietly copied Elidibus’ pose, eerily aware of how drained the Ascian occupying his younger body looked. Or was it _the body_ that was drained?

For a while he said nothing and waited to see if the Ascian would speak first. It was, for all intents and purposes, a silent match to see who broke the silence first—and the Exarch was not going to lose it this time. He had won against _Eijika_ in matches like this before. Not eve Krile had managed that in the past. In silently waiting for an answer games he quite dared calling himself an expert.

Surely enough, Elidibus might as well have turned into a puddle as he exhaled and sunk further against the railing.

“Bodhum,” he said, voice barely more than a whisper, “and Alexandria had an event similar to this in the past. For all their differences, Alexandria’s Flareseekers and Bodhum’s Steelhearts were still sibling cities and sibling people—and their airships powered by united purpose were a sight to behold.”

As unhinged and single-mindedly determined they were to see their cause to the end no matter the atrocities they committed, there was still something eerie about being so close to a being that had caused unspeakable hurt. Ryne had said that even if they sought redemption in the end this was not theirs to give and the Ascians would very likely spend the rest of eternity making amends for the horrors they committed. Which, as Unukalhai dryly remarked, would be only just.

He decided to ignore the genuinely homesick-sounding statement. “You look barely capable of what will be required of us.”

A low groan was his only reply.

“If you would prefer staying behind, I reckon we can place you under surveillance by House Fortemps.”

“… Spare me that humiliation, Exarch. I will be of no hindrance—but I know not how much of a help I will be, either.”

He flicked his tail back and forth. “Considering our current stance as allies, Emissary, I am obligated to ask: is this something that anyone can help you with?”

Elidibus nailed him with an empty stare that likely was supposed to be a glare. Just the fact that he had managed to turn his head at all was impressive. “You face your demons, Exarch; I shall contend with mine.”

His words had an unspoken threat behind them—the Exarch knew that the demon Elidibus was likely talking about was the Primal they summoned at the end of days. It seemed obvious enough that this timeline’s Unsundered were starting to see their actions in a slightly different light given that they now had to face the Sundered as if they were truly living people. But Elidibus carried a lost timeline with him where his voice did not reach their deity, where his voice was the only one even trying to reach that deity and he was met with stark, shocking silence and violence.

“Suit yourself. But once we have a moment to breathe assuming you do not collapse and expire in Azys Lla… tell me more about those cities you mentioned. Bodhum and Alexandria—the latter especially has a rather fascinatingly similar name to a Primal.”

The Ascian rolled his eyes. “You, Exarch, are a more demanding child than our dear Seer was for several thousand years. Which by itself is quite a feat, doubly so considering your lacking state.”

“I aim to impress, Emissary,” he chimed gleefully.

He couldn’t even deny feeling a little bit of relief when the usual tension that Elidibus seemed to carry returned somewhat as he slowly, agonisingly slowly, stood back up straight. His ears were still low and his tail was still drooping, but he was standing. They were enemies forced to work together, yes, but at this point they had spent quite a while working to a common goal.

“Very well.” A slow wave of the hand. “If anyone asks you, however, what went on here—I was airsick. In advance.”

The Exarch snorted. 

As foreboding as this first flight of the Excelsior might have been in that moment while not knowing which additional players either entered or left the stage, at the very least this utterly dry humour reminded him of Lyna in the best and worst possible ways. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the little blurbs i write before i start every chapter so i know whats happening for this one's first segment is.
> 
> elidibus: (has 16 vuln stacks)  
> meteor: (mentor) thals fucking BALLS, dude, do the MECHANICS, IVE EXPLAINED THIS THIRTEEN TIMES BY NOW  
> hyth: (mechanics are for cars macro)  
> ryne, unu: (sprouts who try hard)  
> exarch: (returner who tries hard)  
> laha, emet: ultimate legends btw


	45. INTERLUDE VIII: On the Star's People and the Gone Wrong

“In the end, I do believe this is the better choice concerning this particular incident—Professor Lahabrea, are you feeling quite alright? You have been scowling for just about an hour and a half.”

Eirwen was nothing if not obnoxiously attentive when she did not channel her energy into bending the rules to her every whim. While not a particularly good character trait for a _person,_ it made for an excellent _phantomologist,_ unfortunate as that was. And, of course, students and their teachers had the bad tendency to be rather alike. While most people would merely call him middle-aged here in Amaurot, he most certainly was considered ancient by many other people.

“Something troubles you about the news from Bodhum, then?”

He rolled his eyes and started messing with a stack of papers. She had come to him with a question regarding some rather unsavoury business in the darker edges of phantomology, questions that needed to be answered for her to understand why precisely those were the darker ends of their craft. Sometime after he finished Mitron dropped in to hand him a stack of papers regarding the very business they were discussing, and Eirwen had taken to holding a passionate speech about Bodhum’s business being Amaurot’s business by extension given how closely together their people tended to work.

“Is it because it is your father’s—”

He glared at her from his spot, which surprisingly enough made her words die in her throat.

“Now, make no mistake here, Eirwen,” he began after carefully putting the documents into the appropriate binder, “you are outstanding in all that you do, but your lack of wider knowledge is painfully obvious at times. You have a fair idea what lies beyond the city limits but you have not yet had the chance to expand your horizons in the way that is required to cast a proper judgement on what is and what is not Bodhum’s business. Flareseekers living in their ancestral home are, how to put this… not _appreciative_ of outside meddling. They do tolerate if not love their light-scaled siblings from Alexandria but anyone else is seen as a meddler in what should be Bodhum’s business. And while yes, indeed, I too am a Flareseeker, I would be seen as one such meddler. Amaurot knows this and only interferes when the explicit request comes from the city. Your youthful energy and determination to see this star chronicled and in prosperity is a boon—but this, my dear, is out of your or anyone else’s realm of expertise.”

It was her turn to scowl now, and he snapped yet another binder shut with a sigh.

“Let me put it as bluntly as humanely possible. Flareseekers from Bodhum would sooner tear you to pieces than tolerate your good-natured meddling because they are not only hard-scaled but also incredibly thick-skulled. So thick-skulled, in fact, that it took my father three millennia to realise that perhaps the scholar he fell in love with left with a little more than simply the robes on her back and her half-scorched communal mask. Even with the best intentions, for the sake of your own and Amaurot’s greater safety, it is important that you withhold any plans, ploys and plots to see Bodhum’s business fixed without Bodhum asking for help.”

Eirwen shook her head. “Permission to speak my mind freely?”

“You needn’t ask, but granted.”

“Flareseekers sound insane.”

He could not help but snort loudly at that. “I would sooner eat my own tail than fight you on _that_ statement. But all perceptible insanity oft belies a deeper reason for such behaviour. Recluse and idiotic at times they may be, you might as well scour the entire star to find a people more single-mindedly determined to keep them and their loved ones safe. You would not find an equal to a true Bodhum-raised Flareseeker in a million million years.” He lashed aforementioned tail around in amusement for a moment. “And even they know when they are outmatched. Perhaps it is a matter they can resolve quietly by themselves, perhaps it a matter that requires Amaurotine expertise—or perhaps another city’s well of knowledge altogether. Do not bury your worries, do not close your heart to them, but hold your feet still for a few moments longer.”

* * *

It was ever the duty of the learned to teach the inexperienced. Amaurot was oft described as slower than other cities on this star due to its tendency to make certain even the uninvolved’s opinions were heard and understood. Of course that meant that sometimes it was detrimental to progress, something that the other people usually took in stride. Other places were more specialised with what they did, therefore leading to faster solutions whenever issues particular to those specialisations arose. Amaurot meanwhile strove to equalise the specialisation fields between all its people.

Of course, having a seat on the Convocation and having the honour of shedding one’s name meant that they had to make calls that sometimes went against Amaurotine standard.

All of them and all their predecessors had had to make calls that completely went against their duty even. He had been silently awaiting his—but it had not come until this very moment.

“S-Speaker, with all d-due respect, these restraints will not hold much longer!”

Of course a thick-skulled, single-mindedly determined creature would prove Bodhum’s downfall. Too bad about the thing being hell-bent on destruction even long after naught remained of his people’s ancestral home to the point that it had _slaughtered_ an entire _squadron_ of researchers and creation-hunters _trained to restrain even the most murderous._ The loss of life already was catastrophic to begin with, but if this thing broke free now it would likely not have its fill of flesh and blood even if it butchered each and every soul within the facility, and Amaurot proper was not far away.

“Evacuate the building. I will deal with this.”

“Wh-What?”

“ _Are you daft? Evacuate the bloody building and let me deal with this!”_

While many said that the Speaker and the Emissary’s roles were similar enough, there was a key difference between them. The Emissary mediated, not only between foreign dignitaries and Amaurotine representatives but also between the Convocation as a whole. There was no need for an Emissary to be a fighter—anything else would undermine their position as mediator. The Speaker meanwhile spoke to the masses, inspired them—yes, as the first Lahabrea did, even led them into battle at times. Every single Lahabrea’s case of breaking their oath for the good of the city, the star and its people was related to forgoing words and choosing blunt force.

“Emet-Selch and Igeyorhm, get them here! Not in, but here!” he yelled after the fleeing scientists.

There was no way in hell they would be able to contain this thing.

But perhaps they could lead it away from Amaurot and into uninhabited space.

* * *

His head connected with the table with a deafening thunk. He hadn’t even _noticed_ how abominably tired both physically and emotionally he was by this point. The other thirteen in the room were quiet as they waited for him to recompose himself. He didn’t. His forehead remained on the table.

“The numbers,” he croaked eventually, muffled by his askew mask and unkempt hair, “run them by me again.”

“There are no numbers, Lahabrea. Perhaps this meeting is best adjourned until further notice given your—”

“He means the tally of lost settlements as per the latest reports and influx of refugees seeking shelter,” Igeyorhm coldly interjected. “In particular, I believe what concerns the Speaker are which major settlements were confirmed lost. His state is none of our concern as long as the star itself does not suffer further for it, and while he certainly looks and sounds wretchedly exhausted, I doubt not for a moment that he is in full possession of his usual sharp faculties and tongue.”

Altima huffed and very likely pinched the bridge of her nose as was her wont.

“Very well. Nabriales, if you your be so kind.”

All eyes were likely focused on him now, but Lahabrea had to admit that there was a strange buzzing noise that was starting to feel as if someone had tried to kill him by crushing his skull with a paddle made of solid rock. For a long moment nothing happened—until he raised both hands in a gesture of both defeat and the admission that he was listening.

Nabriales cleared his throat.

“Bodhum and Alexandria are confirmed to have gone up in flames. The entire floating continent came crashing down, meaning that Babil too has been lost. Tycoon Frontier, Fisherman’s Horizon, Nibelheim, all lost and the few survivors set adrift. Communication with Atlantis has ceased and while a team of investigators has been dispatched, admittedly none harbour much of a hope to find survivors given the city’s submerged nature and the unusual roughness of the seas before they still completely following whatever doom is spreading. Saronia appears to be evacuating—”

His voice droned on and on and on, seemingly endlessly. The sheer _volume_ of cities and settlements he recited was _absurd_ , and Lahabrea had never before ever so desperately wanted someone to stop talking. Near the entire continent across the sea had been wiped out from the sounds of it, the homes of countless people gone along with the myriad victims of whatever begot monsters like that abomination they had just barely managed to send straight into the sea where Igeyorhm and Emet-Selch encased it in ice and bound it with chains that only a sorcerer could break.

A tortured sort of sound escaped him—not loud enough for anyone but those right beside him to hear, thankfully enough. Igeyorhm put a hand on his back and Loghrif beside him shuffled ever so slightly, likely with that infernal concern of his on his face.

He had spent more than enough time with those more concerned with biodiversity to know that this was an extinction event they had no way of stopping unless they did something truly drastic. An idea _was_ budding in his mind based on what they had observed while the creature had been contained.

He barely even registered that Nabriales had stopped speaking and that someone else had taken the centre stage. That voice fell silent as he slowly raised his head and sat back up as well as he could. Heavens, he was _exhausted._

“With all due respect, Igeyorhm, I have to object to your interjection. Lahabrea was evidently too unwell to continue this,” Gerun said, whatever he had been saying before clearly of no import any longer. Insistent, ridiculous child, he wanted to snarl but not a sound escaped him. “Considering that you have brushed away the Healer’s concerns before she got to voice them, let me reiterate that Lahabrea is very much in no state to continue this. If you do not believe Altima’s judgement, then consider mine—any longer without rest and a proper meal, and Lahabrea may very well not live long enough to help us find the solution we doubtlessly will find.”

The silence was deafening for the moment that it lasted—then Elidibus dismissed the emergency meeting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> headcanons im ready to go to war for: the player races all existed in ancient times just in Bigger and More Immortal also lahabrea was an ancient xaela


	46. ACT VI: Aetherlogy while Time Travelling for Dummies, Part 3

By the end of it all, he had stopped crying over spilled blood. That, perhaps, had been the one shared attribute for all the people who huddled up at the Frontier and waited for the tide to rise or turn. They had mostly given up on the turn and all but waited for the end. Few took up arms against the relentless oppressive dark—and none of them returned. It was a regular occurrence for a scavenger to return with another would-be-hero’s mangled corpse, sometimes still warm, sometimes more a chunk of unidentifiable flesh and broken bone than anything resembling a person. Other times they were drained of aether but not enough to turn them into monsters as well. 

Worst of all, the times where those were still alive and _begging_ to be put down. Eventually someone did, without fail. A swing of an axe. A sword, a dagger, a blade made of ice.

Death as a concept had lost all meaning to Unukalhai a long, long time ago. Perhaps being technically speaking deathless had only made this worse, something that the Warrior of Light eventually said he had confessed in that other timeline. Hearing that a death had rattled this other timeline’s version of him had made him think about it for a while—but he had to admit defeat and come to terms with the fact that he did not understand how any death could have meant something to him.

The Warrior of Light was the exact opposite, it seemed. They had a burning passion for the world and its people despite the countless times that those very people had tried to kill them in turn. They had suffered sacrifices that Unukalhai would have called pointless shows of heroics in a world that was doomed to fall either way. Much as the heroes from the First would inevitably seek to rejoin their world to the Source, in truth he just wanted the Thirteenth released from its endless state of aetherial limbo—if that meant that it had to rejoin as well, all hells and heavens be damned, he would have willingly played his beloved and long-forgotten home’s reaper. This one, however, fought against the needless heroics and the Rejoinings with a conviction that beggared belief.

A hero.

A true, actual hero. Perhaps this was what Celaeno had seen in that group she had been supposed to oppose. But much like Celaeno’s hope went up in flames, there was a high chance that this warrior would break before long.

“We are being trailed,” Elidibus croaked from where he had all but collapsed against a part of the airship where he could hold on to something should the flight get rougher. Beside him stood Emet-Selch likely with the intention of making certain the Emissary would not fall.

“Beg your pardon?” asked Cid from the wheel.

“He said that we are being trailed, Garlond,” Emet-Selch said calmly and crossed his arms. “The good news is that they do not appear to have any intention to cause problems yet. The bad news is, they very well might once we cleave our way into Azys Lla. And the worse news—”

“ _Worse_ news!?” The Lalafell named Wedge almost squeaked this, and then slammed his hands over his mouth. “S-Sorry. What was it that you were saying, Architect?”

A hysterical giggle of some sort made most heads turn towards the Speaker. There was a mad, feverish glint in his bright eyes as he tilted his head to the side and threw one arm out to gesture at the clouds below that very likely hid whatever they were being trailed by. “An imperial warship,” Lahabrea said with a calm that was worse than anything he could said or done in that very moment. “I hope you know how to fly Garlond, lest we all fall off to our deaths or get incinerated before we ever reach our destination.”

Emet-Selch sighed and drew a hand down his face. “Precisely that.”

Up ahead lay Azys Lla, its shields as unmoving to those without a key as ever. He chewed on his lips for once, a hand curled around his staff and the other holding onto a railing hard enough that his knuckles turned white. As the story went, Meteor had barely made it past the barrier all thanks to the sacrifice of one woman—the Lady Iceheart. She had proven to be a soul full of kindness with naught but the burning desire to set right what once went wrong putting her in a villain’s shoes. Her tactics thus adjusted for her villainy; in a sense a strange echo of what the Unsundered were doing and had done back in Amaurot. A deity summoned believing that it would set things right—except that her story reached the point where she repented for her actions with the highest sacrifice.

And according to Meteor it had not righted the wrongs she had done. The heretics under her tried to right all of it, she had been rightfully painted as a tragic figure in the last throes of the Dragonsong War in Count Edmont’s account of the Dragonsong War, yet none knew her as a tragic hero. The Exarch revealed that while many accounts tried to say that she had had a point, her death meant that there was no way to ever right the wrongs she had done.

Meteor had already confessed that they wanted to give Lady Iceheart the chance this time around, the integrity of the timeline be damned.

Which meant that the imperials trailing them would get a free shot at them.

Another horrible giggle interrupted his train of thought. Unukalhai and several other people once more turned to look at Lahabrea.

Whether the Speaker was aware of how utterly, heartbreakingly sad he looked in that moment as he leaned over the rail to look below and behind the Excelsior was a mystery that Unukalhai would not be solving any time soon. But as he looked, the hysterical laugh died in his throat and was replaced with a deadpan, droning tone as he spoke.

“For what it is worth, Architect and I may very well be able to buy us a few moments with enough force behind our spells. If Comet were to join in, we may very well have just enough time to slip through the shield, assuming the Azure Dragoon can work fast enough.”

A pointed glare from the man in question—it only brought the mad look back to Lahabrea’s face. Unukalhai wrung his hands for a moment as quite a few eyes landed on him to see if he decided to do as the Speaker said or not. Rather than giving an answer he drew his staff.

Meteor was the actual hero here. Given her backstory, Ryne too was a hero in her own regard, one who did not have a clear path cut out for her like Meteor had had. Out of the three Warriors of Light on the deck right now, Unukalhai knew he was the sole outlier. A ‘hero’ of a fallen world, more Ascian than Sundered by this point. Where Meteor and Ryne clearly enjoyed travelling, he found himself growing wary of it nearly at the same rate as the Unsundered did. It just served to make him wonder what would happen should the currently unthinkable ever come to pass.

Would he still feel like he belonged in a reconstructed Thirteenth? He already knew that he would not feel as if he belonged on the Source even if the Void were to be rejoined after being properly primed through whatever possibility remained.

“S-Starboard! Warship emerging, chief!” cried Wedge just as they once more approached the barrier surrounding Azys Lla.

Perhaps he could mull this over later. As the airship took a sharp turn to gain some ground, Unukalhai dropped his staff. It slid across the floor just as everyone scrambled to get into a proper position—Meteor had rolled their eyes and lunged for the Emissary. Within a moment they had grabbed the surprisingly exhausted-looking Elidibus and kept him in a vice grip under their shoulder. The Exarch and Y’shtola both took position near Emet-Selch and Lahabrea with the latter saying that they would also lend them their spellpower if necessary. Biggs and Wedge took their position near Cid, who in turn would be focusing on the flight. Ryne and Hythlodaeus both shuffled closer to Estinien, with Ryne saying that she had experience with channelling aether into things and Hythlodaeus shrugging before adding that someone had to make sure the Azure Dragoon did not fall off while concentrating in case of another sharp turn.

He bounced after his staff, watching in horror as it slid off the airship—and lunged forward with the same spell he had been using for movement instead leaving his lips to yank the staff back up. Aetherial rope was perhaps the most basic spell they had always used in Frontier; after all one could use the relentless dark around them for something as basic as that. Here on the Source it was a glittering, almost ephemeral-looking thing that manifested just in time to wrap around the staff. He pulled and the staff went sailing back up, with Y’shtolas blind eyes following the trail of aether as he caught his staff once again.

“Impressive, very impressive,” she murmured as he wasted no time in pushing himself between Lahabrea and Emet-Selch at the railing.

If the imperials wanted a fight, he was more than happy to oblige.

* * *

He near startled out of his borrowed skin when Ryne leaned in with a hum.

The group had split to search for anything that could open the way to the Aetherochemical Research Facility and Unukalhai had deliberately wandered off to gain some height. The Flagship loomed above them, and with it loomed the bindings that secured the Warring Triad. Those bindings weighed heavy on his mind—only after explicit confirmation as to how the Thirteenth had suffered from it had Emet-Selch directed Allag to create similar technology. Celaeno had been _furious,_ and now that he thought back to that he had only felt empty back then. He felt the same right now.

Like a void.

“Sorry, sorry! I did not mean to startle you at all,” Ryne immediately apologised, her hands held up as if to show him he was unarmed.

Unukalhai mumbled that it was okay and readjusted his mask. Standing here and staring at what had destroyed a home he never truly got to know was pointless anyway—especially given that the very Igeyorhm who had plunged it into darkness had been gone for much, much longer. The one Lahabrea had had to dispatch not too long ago had however been the first Igeyorhm to truly speak to him and not see him as a reminder of an indelible guilt that every reascension of hers remembered with shocking clarity.

Then again, weren’t they all pieces of the same soul? Was it truly right to consider the Ascended _different_ people despite all of them having the same soul at their base?

“I have been wondering… have you ever thought of a way to save your home?”

“My… home.” Though Ryne could not exactly see it given how this mask covered his entire face, he was very much chewing on his lips for long moment as he thought. His answer came rather late and flat: “Most theories were dashed on accounts of advanced aetherlogy and slight changes to how it behaves after the Sundering.”

Unukalhai half expected her to ask what any of that meant—Elidibus had very slowly chewed the meaning of this up for the remnants of the Thirteenth. Then again the Source—and likely the First on account of their link in an alternate timeline—had a better understanding of most of these things than the Reflections.

“I see,” was all Ryne said before she crossed her arms. “Have you or any people ever ventured beyond, err… Frontier, I believe it was called?”

“Most who attempted never returned. Those who did return did so in bloody chunks of maltreated flesh and bone or worse, on the verge of turning into monsters. Which was a worse end than being torn to pieces on account of how horrifically painful that change was.” He had not exactly meant to sound so deadpan, but truth be told there was no point in saying it in any other way. “Whatever lay beyond, I presume Meteor and the Exarch saw more of what lay beyond Frontier during their venture into the pocket of the Void governed by the Cloud of Darkness and her court.”

“Hmm.” Ryne crossed her arms and paced around a little. “I assume those pockets governed by different courts are a thing over there?”

“There are general rungs you can sort them into, but the strongest of the highest rung all commandeer those of the lower rungs. You divide them into courts based on which high-rung controls that particular pocket. Of course, the Source uses different terminology for that, but that is what we called it before Frontier fell.”

“How did you divide into courts?”

He shrugged. “Allegedly they merely stuck to whatever settlement they took over. Bigger courts gobbled up the smaller ones eventually, but as it fell it just so happened to concentrate around former settlements and their broad regions.”

“Just like the Lightwardens, then…. Say, would defeating a governor make the court disperse?”

He had no idea where any of this was going. Unukalhai shrugged before taking his mask off to show her that he was less than happy about this conversation with his face rather than words. “We never slew a governor—experiences with Voidsent suggest that another would immediately take its place. Most courts fight amongst themselves to prove their superiority unless it is a clear power gap between the governor and the rest of the court such as with the Cloud of Darkness and hers.”

Whatever was going through Ryne’s head, she was not sharing it as she paced. With the Warring Triad looming in the background it brought back some unpleasant emotions and fears he had not felt in a long time, but it seemed as if fate was content dragging it all back out first with Celaeno on the First and now Ryne here.

“So there is not quite a chance of something like Eden remaining there….”

“What does Eden have to do with any of this?”

“Unless Gaia’s theory about the Void was wrong, of course… but a lack of Eden, hmm….”

“Gaia? Your… girlfriend?”

“We had Norvrandt and the Empty, but the Void has swallowed all, which means we would have to find another source of balance and—oh. Oh!” She whirled around and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Balance, of course! You are a Warrior of Light from the Thirteenth!”

Unukalhai tried to take a step backwards, but her grip on his shoulders was surprisingly iron. “Y-Yes? I thought I had made that much clear.”

“A Warrior of Light who has spent most of his life working with the Ascians, no less! I had an Oracle of Darkness to oppose my role as Oracle of Light while we brought back the elements to what the light expunged, but you are both Oracles in one Warrior package!”

“Ryne, I have no idea what in the seven hells you’re even talking about!”

Finally she stopped, her eyes blown wide and a dumb, surprised expression on her face. She blinked several times before slowly, agonisingly slowly, she removed her hands from his shoulders and allowed him to take a step back to get his personal space back.

As much as they had filled him in—which apparently had been the entire picture, whatever Elidibus withheld notwithstanding—he had not experienced the same events quite yet. He was an Unukalhai of a timeline that would never have gotten to this point, and hells, even considering that there were other versions of him out there based on a different decision he had made in the past was bewildering and frightening to say the least. Whatever she was going on, it was clearly aimed at an Unukalhai she did not even know, the one who had left Elidibus’ side to deal with the Warring Triad as discreetly as he could and then chose to remain despite never truly being a Scion. A death had gotten to him—something that he could never imagine himself doing.

“… Right. Right. I apologise,” Ryne muttered and shrugged. “I suppose I should start from the top, then. Or cut the long story short, considering that Meteor appears to be approaching Wedge down there already. Back in Norvrandt, on the First, your governors were called Lightwardens. Sin Eaters were the courts, and they followed the Lightwardens without question due to the inherent power of the Wardens. We eventually pushed back the light enough with the defeat of the Wardens that Norvrandt could _flourish_ despite everything around it being expunged by pure light. But the Empty, which is what we called the void of light beyond the frozen Flood, held another secret. A secret that allowed me and the Oracle of Darkness to work together with the Warrior of Darkness to reinvigorate the elements. Aetherial balance. The capacity to flourish, despite advanced aetherlogy suggesting that it was… expunged. A void of light, if you will. I am fairly certain we can repeat that feat on the Thirteenth if given the chance, but we need… a beacon and a source of balance. Gaia and I as opposing Oracles were that balance. You as Warrior of Light working with Ascians could be the same for the Void. That has been on my mind of late, after watching the Unsundered.”

There were many things he could said or done. Celaeno had given up the hope of seeing their home ever again—she had been born before the Flood of Darkness rose to the massive swell that consumed all but the highest point that the people then called Frontier. Unukalhai had barely been older than a year when the flood rose, and in the dozen years of quiet acceptance before the flood swallowed them all, he had learned effectively nothing about his supposed home. Frontier was his home, that quiet, desolate place of the few survivors with little hope and little else. He could have ignored Ryne, could have told her that her optimism was appreciated but well wasted on him and the Thirteenth.

Unukalhai did nothing of the sort. He merely shook his head slowly, agonisingly slowly, before he put the mask back on. “There is nothing to be found in the Void. The only mercy you can grant it and its few survivors is to rejoin it with the Source to end this bleak, bleak tale of a world lost to darkness.”

Other heroes could have saved it, perhaps. People like Ryne and Meteor.

He and Celaeno were not Ryne and Meteor.

* * *

“By the Twelve….”

Their merry little party had come to a grinding halt in the Gamma Quadrant. Having dealt with minor annoyances and Elidibus claiming he had a horrific migraine to which Meteor merely replied with once more grabbing him and throwing him over their shoulder to carry him, they had already expected the Garleans they had so narrowly avoided beforehand. This, on the other hand, was a tad ridiculous.

The safer way, as per usual, was supposedly the longer way. After several days wasted in Azys Lla thus far to travel its entire landmass on foot while following the Guidance Node, the Garleans of course had had enough time to gain a foothold in the Gamma Quadrant. Repurposing an entire Allagan supply and research facility as Emet-Selch correctly identified it, into a small makeshift Castrum the Garleans had dubbed ‘Castrum Solus’, however, was unexpected.

Or perhaps the fact that there was an entire battalion of Magitek Claws roaming the place, clearly on high alert judging from the fact that they were not moving the boxes and heavy beams of metal about. Meteor, with Elidibus still slung over their shoulder, had stopped where no passing Garlean conscript would see them and pinched the bridge of their nose with a heavy sigh.

“It would seem our… path is barred on both counts, unless we somehow learn how to fly.”

The Exarch crossed his arms at that. “That, or we dismantle an entire Castrum or fight a heavily armed and alert squadron on the other side.”

Y’shtola appeared to be thinking, judging from her crunched up expression and her swishing tail. Estinien on the other hand very clearly was losing his patience—the noise of armour shifting ever so slightly as he put his weight on another foot with his annoyed expression barely visible underneath his helm told Unukalhai as much.

“We could… create a diversion for you all to break through,” Alphinaud began after a few more moments to thoughtful, tense silence passed. “But that would only get you to the teleporting device. Considering what required our attention in the Beta Quadrant, however, I do fear that a diversion would only serve to lead you to the next block in our road.”

Meteor nodded—a beeping node flew past in the distance, a clear alarm ringing from it. Unukalhai had dealt with alarms like these before; it was an intruder alert and likely would indeed mean that the way forward was barred.

“Simply stating that for once your plans align and requesting permission to pass without incident is out of the question?”

All eyes turned to Hythlodaeus, who defensively raised his hands with a click of the tongue.

“Alright, alright. Never you mind that.”

“We could split up and try to force past them as two groups rather than one,” Emet-Selch said with a roll of the eyes.

Rather than getting an answer right away, Elidibus started struggling against Meteor’s iron grip. He still looked unsteady on his feet but his voice was clear and even when he spoke once he stood. “That, in turn, would lead to us hitting a bottleneck at the device with both groups hot on our heels.”

Unukalhai turned to look around. Allagan constructs of any sort were always strange and mildly to moderately concerning with how they were laid out. Azys Lla in particular had been nearly untouched since the days of the Allagan Empire had come to its abrupt, calamitous end. There were ways he saw from here that they could have easily climbed to sneak around the Garleans, but there was no way of hiding from anyone who might turn their eyes to the heavens. The mages could very likely snipe those people, but the rest of the Garleans scattered about here would have been alerted right away that way as well.

For a good few moments they all discussed things, then Lahabrea let out a loud snort that made them all turn their heads to him. He had been suspiciously quiet for most of their march through Azys Lla thus far, the concerning cackling of his usually breaking out of him whenever they were forced to fight some sort of Allagan monstrosity.

“Come now. And you all call yourselves Scions who have defeated Garleans—with one Garlean in our merry little group, even? There is one solution. One easy, easy solution.”

“I very much like not your tone, Speaker,” Alphinaud said with furrowed brows. “What is this supposedly easy solution of yours?”

Lahabrea’s surprisingly cheerful expression turned into a sneer that befit an Unsundered suddenly. Unukalhai had a feeling he knew what the Speaker was going for—something exceedingly swift, brutal and _efficient,_ but not something that the Scions would employ unless strictly necessary.

“On five you run. Run like all seven hells have risen to chase you. One.”

“Wait, what?”

“Two.”

“Speaker, you cannot be—” “Oh, he _is_ serious.”

“Three.”

“But—!” “Nope, no time!” “Do what he says, Alphinaud.”

“Four.”

“Tch. Adventurers.” “Says the dragonslayer—” “Shut it, move it, go!”

“Five.”

Meteor scooped Elidibus back up, this time holding him like an oversized toddler. The Exarch and Emet-Selch darted off without thinking twice about it, followed by Ryne and Gerun. Y’shtola, Estinien and Alphinaud followed after Unukalhai gave the Azure Dragoon a forceful push.

“Intruders! Sound the ala—”

Just as Unukalhai also started running after their cluster of people, all hell broke loose.

Lahabrea had been staring at a gathering of Magitek Claws that had clearly been brought there to be refuelled. A refuelling station so close to the airship was unwise just in case of something going horrifically wrong, and therefore Castrum Solus as makeshift base of operations also clearly was the perfect place to hold Ceruleum. While efficient, it was rather clear that Emet-Selch had aided in the substance’s development to have something spectacularly flammable on hand in a war.

Said flammability was what Lahabrea exploited with a delighted cackle. One moment Castrum Solus had been fine.

The next moment it was ablaze, with the fire hungrily jumping from one ancient Allagan device to the next. It was utter chaos, and while he heard Regula van Hydrus shout orders and some other Garlean say that the intruders were escaping, the Garleans were too preoccupied with cutting their losses to truly apprehend the Scions that sprinted through this place like they had nothing else to lose.

In a way he almost admired hos _brazen_ this insane plan was.

Lahabrea caught up to them once they were past the castrum, a smug grin on his slightly charred face.

“That, huff, was _insane,”_ Alphinaud squeezed out as he tried to catch his breath.

“But it worked.”

“And what had it not?”

Unukalhai shook his head and straightened up. Indeed, Lahabrea had been efficient as always. The next device lay ahead, undisturbed, and the Guidance Node was blinking almost delightfully once it noticed its charges. The general consensus was that this had been unnecessary but efficient, yet they would have to thank the Speaker after they celebrated their timely escape.

At least until all of them heard the click of a gunblade.

Behind Lahabrea, charred just as the Speaker was, stood Regula van Hydrus.


	47. ACT VI: Aetherlogy while Time Travelling for Dummies, Part 4.1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> me since 5.3: man i am. stuck  
> me, waking up today: I HAVE UNSTUCK MYSELF
> 
> me, just like an hour ago: THIS IS TOO LONG IM GONNA HAVE TO SEVER THIS INTO TWO HALVES HELP
> 
> so here you go. first half. second half coming sunday the latest  
> assuming my brain lets me sleep before i finish time travel au's 3.0

In their muddled dreams, they swore at points they sat at tables with people whose faces were all but blank. They spoke languages that not even the Echo would translate for them in their nightmares, and they sat in places they did never quite recognise but that did not feel wrong. Sometimes they swore it were Amaurotine buildings, usually joined by that faceless blonde whose voice sounded familiar and comforting. Other times it felt like inns and alehouses, abandoned ruins, perhaps a home they lived in. All details were missing, all the people they were with were faceless, their words haunting through their lack of understanding them. 

Meteor woke in cold sweat more often than not, yet no matter how much time they spent trying to figure out _why_ Azys Lla in particular triggered this sort of recurring dream, they never got an answer. 

All they knew at this point was the fact that they had likely been destined to become an adventurer from the first. Souls retread their paths, as Emet-Selch said with a sneer, no matter how strangely they did. And apparently they had always been fated to wander somewhere amongst a group.

Not that their current group was well-organised by any means.

Just as suddenly as van Hydrus had appeared, Lahabrea moved just in time to avoid having a gunblade’s bullet lodged in his lungs. It was shocking how _fast_ the Ascian had grown over time as he recovered more and more bits and pieces of his powers due to being rooted in one place. 

Now, van Hydrus they had expected. There was still an uncomfortable lack of Emperor Varis, but for once history played into their hands.

“You have guts for a bunch of savages,” van Hydrus hissed, “but your luck is about to run out here.”

Without further ado, he started swinging his blade with as much precision as he always did. Estinien avoided that swing by bouncing backwards, drawing his lance mid-air and using it to stop his jump backwards by ramming it into the ground. Alphinaud drew his tome and a shining Carbuncle burst forth near immediately—a thin layer of magic scattering around them forming into a pale shield told them that Y’shtola, too, had drawn her weapon. It was eleven against one, but Meteor knew for a fact that van Hydrus could and would take all of them at the same time.

“A rather bold assumption that any of us were born lucky or are lucky to begin with, imperial tinman” Hythlodaeus chimed up cheerfully which earned him a groan from several people and a gunshot aimed at him. Were he not truly outrageously and blisteringly fast on top of knowing when his provocations would earn him attempted physical harm, he may very well have gotten shot then and there. Without waiting a moment longer, van Hydrus dove forwards, his gunblade hitting several of the small shields that Y’shtola had erected around them all and shattering several of them with that single swipe.

He had already been troublesome back when his reinforcements had thinned out their group a little.

The only thing truly missing in this fight were the aforementioned reinforcements in the immediate beginning—but still the Scions and Estinien were forced to stay behind to keep them occupied once they arrived. Rather than one crestfallen, horrified adventurer desperately praying this was not a repeat of the Bloody Banquet in the next sector of Azys Lla once the Guidance Node had left it were eight people, all them more or less focused on the same thing. 

Emet-Selch watched idly as Lahabrea wiped some soot off his face, Hythlodaeus hopped from one foot to the other a few times while Ryne plucked at a stray piece of cloth that had been nearly torn off mid-fight. The Exarch flexed his crystalline hand a little, a frown on his face once he looked around to take in their surroundings, same as Unukalhai did in that very moment once he safely put his staff back in its holster. Elidibus, still swaying softly from side to side as he walked, had a had raised to his head and was grinding his teeth. Whatever was going on with him, Meteor had no idea but they were not entirely certain how to best ask him about this strange state he was in that even Y’shtola observed as something upsetting his aetheric balance immensely.

“I do have to say, Varis does not choose his hounds unwisely,” Emet-Selch then said while patting down his own robes. “Though it does tend to be the most loyal pups that wind up so tragically dead in a ditch.”

“That, or the rabid little shites go and gnaw the flesh off their master’s bones,” Lahabrea hummed and shook his head wildly.

That was another thing Meteor was not entirely sure how to address. Something about the Unsundered had most certainly changed in thoroughly baffling ways ever since the fourth had joined their little party. Emet-Selch would have _never_ complimented a choice Varis had made. Lahabrea in general seemed about a wrong word away from either killing everyone or breaking down and screaming until he coughed blood, and Meteor did not particularly care to find out which one he chose.

But for now all they could do was forge on ahead.

* * *

At the end of the road, Lahabrea and Igeyorhm had waited for them. Now that the Scions were no longer present, the Exarch all but abused the fact that he was of Royal Allagan descent; and whatever he could not use, Emet-Selch almost effortlessly logged into and got it to do what it was supposed to do. Compared to the slow sluggish, beset on all sides by Garleans in the facility and by the very experiments inhabiting the place advance Meteor had been forced to make back then, they were comically fast. Emet-Selch shepherded them through the Aetherochemical Research Facility with but a grumbled complaint that the mortals had apparently never truly found these routes. They passed what Meteor knew to be the Triad Control Room, machines and whatnot that Krile had worked her way through beside Unukalhai with notes she had all but snatched from G’raha Tia’s study material.

Hythlodaeus leaned over a security screen and clicked his tongue. “I had my suspicions about van Hydrus, truly, but the sheer tenacity of his devotion is not to be underestimated. Left alone he will certainly gain on us.”

“So lock the door, Gerun,” Emet-Selch snarled. “I am rather certain you spent more than ample time snooping around Allag to know as much.”

“If you wish to land a low blow, my dear, drop the title—you sound ridiculous calling for a fourteenth seat that has not been taken since before the very day the heavens split upon us.”

“Cease you bickering,” Elidibus hissed, rubbing his temples. “Both of you. Lock the obvious and less obvious ways into the Triad Control and all rooms linking to it. If memory serves, van Hydrus is merely after the technology that binds Eikons; all else can serve as distraction to keep him occupied until we have a moment to deal with him.”

Meteor made a mental note that the Warring Triad needed to be taken care of sooner rather than later and instead glanced at another screen that the Exarch had been occupied with ever since they entered this room.

“Raha?”

The Miqo’te shook his head. “There is something that has been bothering me, but I cannot quite say what it is.” The screen he was staring at showed the very room they were in search of, where the first of the Unsundered had fallen so very long ago that their memory had started going fuzzy. “Something here is… off. In ways very much concerning what we but recently discussed.”

“History off the tracks….”

“I hope it is but an incorrect gut feeling. Truly I do—but I fear we cannot quite count on all being the same as you remember it being. We already lack two of the main players on the opposing side….” He glanced at Lahabrea, who had shoved himself between the other Unsundered and furiously entered code after code that he had clearly memorised when Emet-Selch had used them earlier. “Not to mention the dubious absence of the Emperor.” The Exarch shook his head and shrugged, finally tearing himself away from the screen and instead taking a step towards Unukalhai and Ryne.

The two Warriors of Light from the Thirteenth and the First had been engaging in some sort of game while the more technologically inclined worked with the facility’s control panels. Meteor watched how Unukalhai very hurriedly dismissed something or other that he had manifested, a cloud of dark aether giving away that he had likely been messing with a Voidgate behind their backs.

The Exarch flicked an ear at that, clearly pleased to have a change of topic right under the tip of his tail while the Unsundered continued their pointless bickering over which locks were best engaged and which ones were best left somewhat open to draw Regula van Hydrus and his legion in.

“I do have been wondering about one thing, Unukalhai.”

Meteor noticed that the youngest-looking of their merry little group immediately closed up any openness he had displayed with just Ryne before. It was very reminiscent of how the boy had acted before the events surrounding Zurvan had taken place.

“Allag searched for ways to make pacts with the Void, Xande specifically so he could shed the mantle of mortality. Black magic many generations later also employed magicks of the Void, usually manifesting in pacts of blood forged between Voidsent and Source. Were you… ever quite involved with this?”

Unukalhai shook his head. “I was an observer before I was an actor. I watched Xande’s folly unfold and unwind as the earth broke apart to swallow him and his pact whole. Mhach and its black mages I never interacted with.”

“I see. Thank you—but that raises another question. What do you consider yourself, then? Speaking from the perspective of someone who studied all sorts of magical theorem, of course. A scholar’s curiosity, you may say.”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Unukalhai near immediately replied. “We are an odd group to begin with—it is a strange balance, truly it is. On one hand, Zodiark’s three most fervent servants. On the other hand, two with the Blessing of Light and a time traveller who by all means is deserving of the title Warrior of Light in his own rights. As for myself, I fall in the middle out of choice just as the Fourteenth falls into the middle out of necessity. It is a balance, but you are an outlier amongst your own side, Exarch.”

Meteor raised an eyebrow at that—while Unukalhai had not ever truly left his perch in the Solar despite technically being a Scion back in the abandoned timeline, he had developed quite a knack for asking armour-piercing questions to all the people who dared approaching him with a question of their own. While this Unukalhai lacked the less than comical, hideously dry self-depreciating jokes at times whenever the duties of a Warrior of Light came up, the fact that he was starting to throw back questions like that as quickly and effortlessly as he did was a similarity they had not caught before now.

“As for what I consider myself, perhaps calling me a Void Mage rather than a Black Mage suits me better than anything the Source could come up with. After all, that is what I am—a mage from the Void. Now, I believe we best quit this conversation, lest the Speaker tears our heads off for idling a moment too long.”

Three heads turned to where Lahabrea had crossed his arms and was tapping his foot impatiently. Several switches on that wall the Unsundered had been arguing at had been flipped and turned and several doors were now shown to be locked—but Lahabrea had clearly been waiting for them to notice him for a while by now.

“Oops.” “My bad!” “Sorry, sorry.”

* * *

They still remembered how hauntingly loud their footsteps had been in this part of the facility. If they had compare them to something, it would have been as loud to them as the gunshot of Emet-Selch neutralising the Exarch’s plots atop Mt Gulg had been. Even the twist and churn of aether as Lahabrea and Igeyorhm materialised to stop their advance had been deafening in strange ways. The heavy clunk of armoured boots while Thordan’s voice rang clear through the vast empty space.

The distant howl of Azys Lla’s thunderstorms as they fled with the Scions and the surviving Garleans, some of which were dragging Regula van Hydrus’ corpse along had been overwhelmingly loud—which had made Unukalhai’s shaking and quiet voice hard to catch as he told himself that yes, the battlefield was not a place to start doubting himself or his actions just as the Garlean legatus had said.

Once more, distantly thrumming thunder was all they heard once the group scattered in the room to look around. The aether was charged, prickled on their skin as it usually did. That much was the same; be it their childhood home in La Noscea or the distant plains of the Azim Steppe or even the quiet but vibrant Lakeland.

For way too long it was way too quiet.

Then, finally, someone broke the silence.

Elidibus’ voice was shockingly clear for someone who still looked as if he would keel over at too strong a gust—but he even straightened up a little to look around. “I do not believe the Archbishop is here. Or even within the facility. It is too quiet. The aether is too… undisturbed.”

“Were we… too slow?” Ryne put a hand on her face as she asked this, tilting her head to one side as she thought. “Or too fast?”

“Even accounting for me and Emet-Selch having free access to everything in Azys Lla, the Archbishop had quite a headstart on us and he is a Primal by this point with more than enough Tempered to take out an entire Allagan facility in essentially no time.”

Meteor pinched the bridge of their nose. Things had not been adding up properly for a while by now, but this was concerning in more way than one. This was supposed to be the climax of this story, the point where Ishgard’s internal conflictkeepers were brought low and the road to peace between them and dragonkind was to be paved anew.

Chattering broke out, but they noticed that two people in particular remained unusually calm and almost lost in thought. For as unhinged and teetering on the verge of a nervous breakdown as he had been, Lahabrea’s gaze was suddenly locked to the ground. It was hard to judge what was going on in his head due to his messy hair hiding his face as he stared. The other one was Hythlodaeus, arms crossed and eyes closed, his face turned heavenward where the prickling aether was the strongest.

“Mind sharing what is on your minds, you two?” Meteor’s voice was soft and did not cut through the chattering to interrupt it. Whatever the others were discussing, they were certainly into their little theories.

Hythlodaeus merely shook his head and opened his eyes. “I am having the strangest sense of deja-vu—which unfortunately means that my _gift_ is trying to warn me of something in the least successful way. As you know, the Echo can be entirely unhelpful when you need it most, and mine has proven to be rather unreliable whenever divergences like these occur because it would seem that it takes a while to calibrate the path we are on. Therefore, I cannot quite share what is on my mind, and I pass the question to Lahabrea.”

There was no reaction for a moment. Lahabrea was muttering something about the Sea of Clouds and Igeyorhm to himself before looking up. His eyes had been unfocused and wild ever since he had returned with an apparently ghastly hole in his aether that he had since patched up, as if something else had completely shattered in his already shattered mind. For the first time, he looked as if he was in full control of himself.

“What was it that you said the Archbishop wished to do by becoming a Primal?”

That question made the other five’s discussion die and they turned their heads to Meteor, Lahabrea and Hythlodaeus.

Meteor crossed their arms. “He… wanted to end the war…?”

Lahabrea shook his head. “Specifics, Bringer of Light. Were there any words in particular he used, about his energy source or his goals?”

“Something or other about prayers of the people as per usual, and the desire for salvation…?”

“ _What_ kind of salvation?”

“How in all seven hells should I know!? I am neither Ishgardian nor Tempered, nor do I know which faith or fury drives dragon and mankind both! Hells, I know next to nothing about salvation as is.”

“… Say that again.”

“Wha?”

“Repeat what you just said. Slowly.”

“Neither Ishgardian nor Tempered, nor do I know which faith or fury in the name of salvation drives dragon—oh.”

Lahabrea put his hands together and took a deep breath. “Speaking as Tempered but not Ishgardian, I know little about dragonkind or the Dragonsong War. _Salvation,_ however, is the base ingredient for Primal nature. I do know a thing or three about Primal nature.”

Reports, scattered about Emet-Selch’s recreation of Akademia Anyder. Perhaps as a warning, perhaps as a way of explanation. Y’shtola, too, found more than enough documents in the remnants of Anamnesis Anyder to support the claim that the very _concept_ of Primal summoning was something that had stemmed from Lahabrea’s vast pool of knowledge about aether and Creation magicks. They had correctly deduced that while on a lesser scale than Zodiark and Hydaelyn, the magicks employed to create a Primal were all but the same for the Sundered—adapted properly to account for the changes in aether density to a degree that only a professional could have made said adjustments.

“This may be conjecture based on what little I know about your supposed timeline and judged from what you said I did in that supposed timeline, but if Igeyorhm was at the Vault ignoring her orders, there is a good chance that the Archbishop, too, noticed something amiss with the Warriors of Light. Going by that and what you described Primal Thordan as, it is a Primal aligned to light—supported by the attempt on your life being a not quite skilled but potent blade of light to strike you down. As you claim, he sought to end not merely the war, but also—“

For a moment, they thought they saw Emperor Varis sitting opposite them and the Eorzean Alliance’s leaders, saying that what he sought to do would return history to the hands of mankind rather than the shadows controlling it from the moment the universe as they knew it came to be. “He wanted to demolish ascian influence.” 

“Exactly. Now then, Primal nature. Despite everything, they are bound to that which summoned them in the first place. Even should they scorch the entire world, in the end they will return whence their hearts came—unless, of course, they were summoned with a different task for their hearts. The arts of summoning with a person serving as heart has been _mostly_ lost—Nabriales succeeded in somewhat recreating the phenomenon by using an Echo-bearer’s desire. But rather than serving as the heart, it would seem that the Primal serves your friend instead, almost as if the laws regarding summoning like that have been rewritten to prevent that which already came to pass from occurring again. Now then, class, here is the one question that we should be able to answer now: where are the Primal Thordan and its Thralls of the Round if not here?”

A long pause. 

Then Meteor turned around with a loud curse damning the Twelve. There was one answer only, and that answer was less than encouraging—especially knowing that Primals tempered with reckless abandon. 

“Midgardsormr, Father of Dragons!” they called and then turned to face their allies. “Help my allies here keep the facade of being mere mortals. Take them to where the Scions are, or back to Helix to inform the mortals there. Ishgard is in danger, and that danger will absolutely turn its gaze towards your children next.”

They did not wait for a confirmation from the dragon that materialised at their behest or the assortment of Ascians of Dark and Light or the time traveller. Meteor teleported away. 

* * *

Perhaps bursting into the place the way they did had not been a good idea. Several dragonets startled away screeching, their older siblings or parents equally startled. Vidofnir had risen to her feet with a loud hiss, her tail lashing furiously for a moment before she realised who was here. 

Ysayle and a good number of the heretics with her also had jumped to their feet in surprised shock. 

“Meteor?”

The name made several of the heretics relax; Ysayle had apparently not been idle and had instead gathered her supporters far from Coerthas to lead them back there. Most of them were wearing travelling gear of some sorts, most weapons handmade rather than clearly stolen from the Temple Knights. 

“My apologies for bursting in like that,” they wheezed, still mildly dizzy from teleporting to Foundation only to immediately hurl themselves back to the aetherial trails that led them to Anyx Trine. While not someone who suffered from teleportation nausea like some of the other people they knew, it was ill-advised to teleport in rapid succession no matter how unbothered the person was by a teleport. “But there is… something I would request—no, I would enlist your aid, Lady Iceheart. From one gifted to another.”

Ysayle blinked several times, surprise plain on her face. They did not exactly have time for her to ask the question that was starting to form in her head by now, and Meteor shook theirs instead. 

“Long has the Holy See obscured the truth with malevolent intent. To keep commoner and noble alike from learning of their ancestors’ atrocities, to keep the war going for as long as it would go. To butcher more of dragonkind in an attempt to further their powers. With a heavy, hesitant heart did we behead one of the two eternal forces in this conflict—a heavy heart that the Azure Dragoon shared with us in the end, for our actions were not heroic nor did they grant the peace we wished them to offer. But one force remains, emboldened by the other’s demise. Ishgard is in grave danger of becoming a false god’s thralls. While your gift kept you from enthralling your fellows, this false deity of mortal make is going to turn the entire city into its mindless slaves to labour and pray endlessly to feed its powers.”

Muttering broke out amongst the dragons and the heretics alike, and Meteor took a deep, desperate breath. 

“Lady Iceheart, I beg of you—help me end this conflict before the grounds for peace that dragon and the children of man can yet turn into a garden are scorched by blinding, hateful light.”

In their muddled dreams, often they replaced the faceless with faces they knew in the end. The Exarch and Ryne in what looked to be a different version of the Crystarium, laughing. Emet-Selch and Gerun in a library with them, playful annoyance in the air rather than the glacial tension between them now. Lahabrea at a market board, throwing a bored glance at them while they stood with Elidibus and Unukalhai. The Scions, all gathered in a tavern, celebrating. 

Ysayle at a planning board with them and Midgardsormr and Aymeric, all hunched over a featureless map and talking about peace. 

“Will your allies meet us in Ishgard?”

“They will catch up, but they are like to arrive later than us due to staying with the Scions.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. Several chattering voices that clearly belonged to dragonets were saying that they would fly into combat if necessary, some older voices shushing them. Judging from the expressions on the heretics’ faces, they too were thinking the same thing the dragonets were. 

Ysayle snapped her eyes open. 

“Your cause and plea resonate with my war-tired heart, Warrior of Light. My blade is yours.”

“Hey,” one of the heretics said near immediately, “do not count us out. If the Lady Iceheart would join your cause, then so would we.”

The encounter with Ravana and the reason behind her joining them was clearly on her mind as she glanced around the room. All possible thralls, just as the Onemind was. But Ysayle knew better than anyone that it was unwise to leave people dedicated to a cause behind. 

“We would not ask you to go into combat,” Meteor quickly began. “But perhaps you could help evacuate the city should things go awry.”

“Prayeth they doth not,” a dragon chimed up suddenly. Heads turned to look at the dragon beside Vidofnir who had spoken, her scales and size giving her away as one nearly as old as Vidofnir herself. “But if thou wouldst accept our aid and maken clear that we doth not mean harm, perhaps our wings too could be of help.”

“Stoh Fah…?”

That was a name the had heard towards the leg end of rebuilding the Firmament. A kind, ancient dragon of some sort who had apparently talked at length with the Haillenartes in particular, to a point that even Laniaitte who had more than ample reason to hate all dragons had said she might have found a kindred spirit in the dragon. They hadn’t even known that dragon had been one of Hraesvelgr’s brood living at Anyx Trine with Vidofnir. 

But time was clearly running out here. 

“We will need all the help we can get—let us write the first chapter of peace together by saving the city, hand in clawed wing!” Ysayle said loudly, her voice filling the crumbling room that had been turned into a dragon’s roost long after its ancient Ishgardian creators had abandoned the place. Her words were met with cheers from the heretics and a more hesitant agreement from the dragons—but an agreement regardless.


	48. ACT VI: Aetherlogy while Time Travelling for Dummies, Part 4.2

Sprinting through Foundation with Ysayle following along may not have been the best of ideas. Hilda had noticed them from the Brume where she had been talking to Haurchefant about something or other, and Tataru too had left the Forgotten Knight near immediately to follow them to the Seat of the Lord Commander where Aymeric had been in a conversation with Lucia. Were one of the Ascians here they would have truly made for an outrageous motley crew of some sort, but Meteor had no time to truly ponder on how hilarious this particular party was. 

They explained, more hurried gestures than anything else, that Thordan was likely about to or had already returned to Ishgard without the _Soleil._ As if to underline that statement, Aymeric’s linkshell received a call from Estinien that they overheard somewhat—something or other about Warriors of Light and returning, and finding the _Soleil_ abandoned in Azys Lla with not a trace of the Archbishop or the Heavens’ Ward. 

“We can assume the entire church tempered at this point should the Archbishop already have returned,” Meteor hissed. “And the selfsame fate will befall all of Ishgard should any of the more panicked voices hearken to claims that Thordan is returned and innocent.”

Aymeric, ever the politician, however, closed his eyes. “What you ask is heavy, Warrior of Light. In my heart of hearts, with my entire being, I do know that you mean well and will see this through. It is however the rest of Ishgard that will certainly not hold hands with heretics or dragons even in a dire crisis.” 

Meteor slammed their hands on the table. “Now is not the time to think about whose toes we are stepping on! Once enthralled there is no returning from that—and even if there were, it would be too strenuous a task to perform on _your entire bloody city!”_

Ysayle put a hand on their back and shook her head. “If it is the heretics you are concerned about, you could always dress them as Temple Knights.”

“Or I pass ‘em off as some of mine,” Hilda added. “It won’t fool the Brume residents unless I explain, but the higher ups certainly cannot tell one rat from the next—unless one rat has bitten particularly hard recently.” She grinned to herself, clearly priding herself in being known as the Mongrel.

“And the dragons—“

“Are laying low and will not rise unless the absolute worst case scenario comes to pass and they are given the explicit order to rise. Stoh Fah has sworn as much and I trust her judgement more than I trust mine own,” Ysayle immediately interjected. “Treachery is a foreign word to her. She will not break her word.”

Aymeric pinched the bridge of his nose. He thought about it almost for too long for their tastes, but eventually he exhaled slowly and deeply. “While deceiving the city’s people is not something I would normally agree to, you do have a point. Should the worse situation come to pass, Lady Iceheart, will your heretics follow my orders till the battle is won?” 

“They will and have already sworn to such. As will the dragons—for they answer my second-in-command rather than I in this situation. So long as no harm befalls any of them they will remain on your side, and even should harm befall them they will simply abandon you rather than seek vengeance on the vulnerable.”

“… Very well. Lucia, if you would be so kind as to oversee this as a possible course of action we may have to take—Lord Haurchefant, Hilda, can we count on your support as well?”

“Sure.” “As ever, Lord Aymeric!”

Meteor nodded quickly and then pushed themself off the desk. “Until the Scions arrive, Iceheart and I will hold the Vault.” 

* * *

They had stormed the place during sunset both times they had gone there during the Dragonsong War. The first time it had been to free Aymeric, the second time it had been to assist him with freeing the Brume hostages. The arching ceiling, the elaborate detailing. 

The sheer, unrelenting cold even within.

Not even the sun’s rays seemed to warm it up despite it being a comically pleasant day for post-Calamity Ishgardian standards. The skies outside were bright light blue, the sunlight seemingly piercing as it fell through the vast windows. But the ancient stone was overwhelmingly cold. When they breathed out, their breath came out as a small cloud that vanished quickly in the sheer vastness of the place. To say that the Vault could easily hold most of Ishgard was an understatement—and this was merely the basilica. Just as they had heard their own footsteps echo eerily within the heart of the Aetherochemical Research Facility in the past, now they could hear their own heavily armoured steps like gunshots ringing through dead silence. 

This was the heart of the Halonic belief within Ishgard, a supposedly holy site. Much as the Sanctum of the Twelve in the Shroud it was a solemn place for quiet reverie first and foremost—but it could just as easily hold the voices of the worshippers raising them in both joy or sorrow. Quiet as the Reach after it was attacked, with Rhalgr watching over them silently. Loud as the Dawn Throne and the desert’s statues of the Dusk Mother were whenever the Xaela celebrated victories and festivals nearby.

Were they more pious, they would certainly have clasped their hands together to shoot a quiet prayer to the Twelve, perhaps to Halone Herself to grant them and Ysayle Her blessing so that they might achieve victory on this day. But they had never truly been one for prayers to begin with, and with their Echo awakening as it did in the wake of the Calamity, they had started believing in Hydaelyn as their guardian. A feeble, budding faith that was trampled a hundred times over long before Emet-Selch attempted to crush it by revealing the true nature of the Mothercrystal and the ominous deity the Ascians invoked.

Diminished as the Vault’s numbers were, there was still a fair amount of people gathered in this place. The doors fell shut behind them and Ysayle and they were left alone in this realm of cold, sunlit stone and silence. Eyes were upon them from the front rows of the benches and atop the podium, in the distance, amidst the radiant sunlight, stood more figures. Too tall to be truly human.

Too small to truly appear abominable.

Ysayle’s interpretation of Shiva had been very much alike in that regard. Smaller than most other Primals yet much larger than the average human.

She paused for a moment, but Meteor walked on ahead calmly. If nothing else, they knew that Thordan had been awaiting them here and Ysayle followed after her moment of either hesitation or awe. It truly was a breathtaking sight, the way the quite average day turned almost ephemeral-looking with the Vault’s architecture. But it was stone, stone that had been lovingly chiselled and moved, brick upon pillar upon fancy little detail. Stone was, perhaps, the sole witness to history that would never speak the stories it witnessed. 

Perhaps walking into this most sacred place of the Halonic faith with a supposed heretic witch by their side would be written down in history books as some sort of symbolic statement. One chosen as ward of a High House, the other a ward of dragons, side by side—perhaps even hand in hand in some versions—to bring an end to a war that most called eternal. But as far as Meteor was concerned they were merely two people with the Echo doing what most with the Echo inevitably did; they were raising their weapons against a Primal wrought by Ascian machinations. 

“Separate or together, wherever the paths cross,” they had said when they had tried to sway her determination away from pointless sacrifice. This was one such intersection they had thought about countless times. Countless people with the Echo had, irony of ironies, echoed that sentiment. Different were the paths they walked upon, but most of the time those supposedly chosen by the Mothercrystal shared a part of the path they walked, inevitably.

The fact that not a single party said as much as a word until eventually Meteor stopped their slow advance in the middle of the basilica only added to the almost unreal feeling of this encounter. Many such unreal moments had they witnessed in the past, but this one was the first ever since the very day Elidibus had finally challenged them to a fight he would wind up winning. For someone who had made it into history books that had been written and unwritten twice now, this realisation hit them perhaps the hardest. If all went according to plan—and it had to, it had to—this was going to be what the people in the future would read about. How the Warrior of Light and the Heretic Iceheart stood in the middle of the basilica, staring up at the Archbishop-turned-Primal and his entire entourage of tempered knights and priests. 

“Such a lofty goal,” they said into the pristine silence, “returning history to the hands of mankind. Many have attempted such, and I do wonder. Are those that would see this plan through not the ones who would instead merely take over turning the wheel from the previous ones? Does it not make you the same as the Ascians, and whoever controlled history before them?”

No one here needed to know that there had been no entity controlling history _before_ the Ascians. They had merely gone by a different name which changed in the wake of the Sundering. 

Meteor threw wide their arms.

“Those who chase the title ‘hero’ will ever be the villain in the pages of history—should they even make it to those very pages. Lofty goals with the good of mankind at their base do _not_ excuse any atrocities committed in the quest. And every hero knows the blood they spilled, oft without more than a split moment of doubt; those who refuse to see the blood are villains one and all. So answer me this one question ere we begin the inevitable: how much more blood will you spill ere the curtain falls on this chapter of history?”

Ysayle had seen the blood she had spilled. Estinien had seen it too, though his case was more one of a revenge-driven person coming to the realisation that what he had been doing was never going to give any one soul closure despite technically ending a war. Lyse and the Exarch both, driven by only simple desires that turned into so much more complicated things while leaving hundreds dead in their wake and the legacy of these people threatened to crush them entirely.

Meteor themself, apparently, judging from the books that talked about the Eighth Umbral Calamity.

One side of the conflict saw them as a hero who saved the world.

The other side of the conflict, as Elidibus had so scathingly reminded them with Ardbert’s axe at their throat moments before his victory had gone belly up, saw them as naught but a force of nature that brought death and only death to those that dared stand in their path.

“Hear, hear!” The Tempered would always, without fail, try to protect their Primal. Zephirin’s voice rang loud and clear through the empty basilica. Loud, clear, booming. “So speaks the supposed hero walking hand in hand with the very villains who control our history. And now here they stand, hand in hand with a heretic witch—with the gall to claim us the villains!”

They tilted their head to the side with a bored sigh and put a hand on the hilt of their sword. “Yeah, yeah. Hypocrite. You lot are far from the first ones to call me that. But unlike you, I know where my hypocrisy begins and ends.”

Blinding light. They remembered the sheer horror of watching men transform into monsters for the first time in the Vault. The vague fear in the back of their mind as they held their lance in shaking hands in Azys Lla—no allies to speak of, and yet they were facing down a Primal that had almost effortlessly slain the exhausted but resilient Lahabrea when they had struggled to put an end to the exhausted but equally resilient Igeyorhm not moments before. It seemed so very, very long ago.

It was, they realised with a sigh as they unsheathed their sword. In the days following this battle they would almost certainly have to deal with Sidurgu and Rielle; their tale too pressing a tale to not be resolved immediately. They had done so during their stay in Ishgard in the first place anyway—they had not seriously taken up Sigurgu’s offer of teaching them properly until they had been granted leave on occasion while recovering from a horrendous wound in the infirmary here. Estinien had saved their life in the field, and the chirugeons of Ishgard had saved their life proper.

But for any of this to take place, they would have to write this finishing chapter. As long as Thordan remained the city would refuse to work with the Alliance. Everything of import was in the days following the Dragonsong War.

They were going to close this chapter here and now—perhaps even before the others arrived.

* * *

The Echo granted battle clarity that was unmatched. For those aware of what the Echo was it was immediately obvious who else in combat shared the selfsame gift. Ysayle danced whenever the Tempered attempted to go after her instead of uselessly throwing themselves against Meteor. She twirled with frost glittering about her, traced arcs of freshly fallen snow into the air before snapping and raining icicle after icicle down upon them. She grimaced whenever they hit their target, but spilling blood was inevitable.

Thus Ysayle was soon dealing with the tempered members of the church while Meteor, driven away from her, was surrounded by what remained of the Heavens' Ward.

Watching her out of the corner of their eyes when dodging and blocking blows, they soon realised that Ysayle made a much better fighter than the Exarch simply because she had the Echo. She had experience in combat, she had been lovingly taught and had studied her arts on her own time. The contrast between her and the equally studied but slower Exarch and the similarly gifted but utterly self-taught at best Unukalhai was _shocking_ now that they noticed it.

She had the grace of stilled ice by her side, and Meteor’s eyes snapped away from her just in time for them to block an attempt to run them through. Hells, the Heavens' Ward all blended into one another as more and more time trickled away.

Two people would not be able to stem the tide—Ysayle, battered and beaten because the sheer number of opponents made it hard for her to dodge everything, let out a surprised yell when she noticed some priests getting away. The heavy crack of ice echoed through the basilica like a gunshot and Meteor saw that she had turned the fleeing priests likely trying to get reinforcements into literal ice statues. At the same time, Meteor had neither gained nor lost ground on Thordan himself.

A shrill cracking rang through the place, familiar enough that it made their heart constrict.

While not turned into Shiva, Ysayle clearly remained fully capable of doing things the Primal could. The place was dense enough with aether at this point that she had ripped the ice-aspected aether out to aid her; Meteor threw a glance back down into the main hall and saw that each and every single priest had been frozen solid and Ysayle stood amidst what looked like a tidal wave frozen as it advanced with her standing in the centre. They stared for a moment too long in utter horror as they watched Ysayle sink to her knees.

That one look was a mistake they paid for, however—a blast of fire they had noticed a moment too late sent them tumbling back down into the main hall, an uncomfortable crack and a jolt of pain making them clench their teeth to bite back a yowl when they barely managed to turn around mid-air to land on their feet.

They’d fought with worse injuries, of course. But a leg injury made things harder, especially in places as vast as this. Ignoring the pain they hopped away to gain some space between them and the Heavens' Ward, barely in time to avoid several ethereal weapons raining down upon the place they had landed.

Igeyorhm and Lahabrea had fought similarly, now that they thought about it. Ice to immediately bind them where they had just avoided fire; flame raining down upon their head while the ice made it incredibly hard to avoid things. When they had avoided a blast of apocalyptic flame from Lahabrea, Igeyorhm had immediately called upon ichor dyed deepest black for them to land in perfectly.

“Dammit,” they hissed as they weaved past icicles that held tempered priests in them, spears of light shattering these as they made their way to Ysayle. The moment the Primal noticed that she was down it might spell her doom—and the whole secrecy part be damned, Ysayle was more important than keeping the fact that they, too, were effectively an Ascian under wraps. If the Heavens' Ward killed them without them using their little Dark Knight trick to uphold the illusion, so be it.

“Ysayle!”

She blearily looked up.

Behind her, the doors to the Vault were thrown open, more light washing into the Vault.

Time stopped as they heard a rather horrendous tearing and ripping. Ysayle stared at them with wide, horrified eyes. A voice they dully recognised as belonging to Haurchefant—the damn fool, what was he doing here!—yelling followed by a choir of voices that clearly belonged to their other allies telling him to stop.

Ah.

Zephirin’s spear of light had finally struck true, they realised when their sword slipped from their grasp and one of the frozen priests closest to Ysayle shattered with a deafening sound when a blade of bloodied solid light shattered it.

Admittedly, using their little trick on Titan had been a decision they had made in the panicked moment they had when they realised that out of everyone in their party at the time, the Exarch was truly the last remaining mortal. He would not be getting up again to walk after getting smashed by Titan, while they could have simply patched up their body afterwards and walked away seemingly unscathed. But the thought of dying still scared them in ways that they couldn’t quite articulate. Perhaps that, too, came with the clarity that the Echo granted. After all, why should someone who saw so much in advance fall in battle as pathetically as getting crunched into a bloody heap of bone and flesh? Or getting run through from behind while they were trying to run back to their ally.

But they could simply try again. Could lie about having used that horrible little trick that Dark Knights had up their sleeve and make Lahabrea, ever the bastard, hurriedly patch them up under Ryne’s panicked instructions just as Elidibus and the Exarch had had back with Titan.

For the time being, however, they collapsed like someone had cut their strings. A cacophony of voices rang in their ears—Ysayle loudest of all, a horrified scream as they noticed just how horrendous blood on ice looked. Too bright. They heard code names called, more specifically Elidibus’ still strangely exhausted voice calling for Lahabrea and the Exarch specifically and also for Emet-Selch to help out a little and for Ryne to empty whatever damned potions she had. Ice scrunched under heavy armoured boots, followed by the lighter steps of a mage and a lightly dressed frontline fighter trying to stop the fool storming forwards with a furious screech reminding him that this was a Primal and he had only been supposed to get them through the crowd that had started to form in the Pillars because of all the strange sounds emanating from the Vault.

Then, for a second, silence.

After all, it needed a moment to kick in, even if they were faking it. Then they recalled Elidibus’ brusque, unforgiving and rude lessons on how to possess bodies. Part of them wanted to apologise to their other self from this timeline—and the part of that Meteor that had refused to assimilate into their consciousness merely rolled their eyes at them, saying that they should have expected this and that they were rather happy that they now had a way out of here. Using their own dead body as a vessel was… strange, to say the least. But with the dark arts at their side they had technically survived Titan.

This, however, was Ascian handiwork. A soul possessing a corpse, much like Ryne, Lahabrea, Unukalhai and Hythlodaeus were.

The silence passed; and the others played their roles to perfection. Ysayle’s utter horror was not faked as she watched them get up, but the spells that fizzled out around them were but a ploy to keep the roles they played in character. Lahabrea dropped the staff he had to use around people to pretend being a conjurer of some sort while the Exarch clutched his rapier like a lifeline. Emet-Selch snapped his tome shut with a startled grunt, Ryne dropped a potion she pulled from her pockets and Elidibus gagged vaguely and averted his eyes.

They all but whipped around when they heard a grunt and the sound of a weapon hitting the ground behind them.

Just in time to see Hythlodaeus all but _kick_ Haurchefant out of the way with a furious look on his face while Unukalhai clearly debated picking up his staff again and decided against it.

“Lady Iceheart,” the Exarch said softly when Haurchefant ran back to their group, cursing ‘Seer’ seven times over, “would you be so kind as to escort Lord Haurchefant outside while we deal with this?”

Her wide eyes were still locked onto Meteor, still horrified. Meteor tried to say something but instead merely hacked up blood.

This in turn made Lahabrea scoop up his staff with a roll of the eyes and he very deliberately thwapped it against their head before using the frozen but still alive inside the ice priests as energy source to start patching them up.

“Meteor will be fine,” the Speaker said. “Dark arts are, well, dark in nature. Gruesome. Take a while to kick in. They will be fine once we knit that hole in their chest back together.”

Ysayle said nothing and instead rose to her feet.

Meteor thought they saw themself mirrored in her still horrified but determined expression as she shook her head. Just as they had fought off their fear atop the Steps of Faith, atop the Ala Mhigan palace, at the heart of a recreated Amaurot, Ysayle stood steady while her hands shook.

“Let me help you.”

Behind them, the rush of flame against flame could be heard while Unukalhai and Hythlodaeus fought off any attempts on the groups’ lives. With a crack and some rather disgusting noise, Lahabrea’s magicks started doing their job of patching up the gaping hole in their chest. Rattling breath after rattling breath they took, but breathing grew easier as the Ascian fixed their newly repossessed dead body. Eventually they shook their head.

“You would help us more if you made certain Lord Haurchefant does not do something as foolish as this again.”

She raised an eyebrow but nodded in understanding once she looked back at the Primal behind them. And with that, she ran after the fleeing Haurchefant.

It was Elidibus who cracked a small smile once the doors fell shut.

“Colour me impressed, Warrior of Light. That was some quick thinking.”

They wiped some blood off their chin and rolled their eyes. “Had you attempted to kill me by running me through like this, I would have done the same I did as with Titan. Passing my body’s death off as dark arts is surprisingly easy as long as nothing is severed. Which begets the question—did you know about what I would have done back then? Is that why you would have most certainly beheaded me when you won?”

Elidibus shook his head. “I must disappoint; I had no idea. It was more the symbolic cutting the monster’s head off to present it to those that placed the bounty. But now that you mention it, of course beheading a dark knight means they cannot pull their little undead trick. How did I never figure this out?”

“Because you’re a stuck-up stubborn bastard, and we need a bloody hand here!” came the furious yell from Hythlodaeus that made all of them remember that the two most recent members of their party were the only ones holding back the Primal.

* * *

One by one, the Heavens' Ward fell. Much as with their first fight against them, Thordan little by little realised what his opponents were not human. He knew, of course, in the case of the Ascians. But even the sole body with a soul that belonged to it was very much not human any longer—the Exarch had used his crystalline hand to block a blade. Flesh would have been pierced, but the clear sound of metal scraping against crystal had stilled the dragoon enough that Emet-Selch all but blasted him to pieces.

Ryne had the honour of all but curbstomping Zephirin, a fury glinting in her eyes as she answered one of his blasts of light with one of her own. She was the Oracle of Light after all.

In the end, as they slowly vanished around them, only Thordan, his massive sword still in his hands but his allies vanishing, remained. The sunlight filtering in behind them made it more unreal-looking than it had had in Azys Lla, Meteor noted with a dull jolt. But rather than Thordan on the ground as he reverted back into a human, he was standing this time.

“You could have easily tempered the entire city long before we arrived,” Lahabrea said into the once again pristine, unreal silence. “Doubtlessly you would have eventually, given what you did to the priests. But help me understand something here, Archbishop. Why did you not?”

Meteor raised an eyebrow at that. Lahabrea was, effectively, the father of Primals both back before the Sundering and after the Sundering. But the Ascian had a frown on his face as he clearly laboured to understand something, his mask having gotten torn off his face during the fight. 

“It is rather clear in hindsight that you were using us just as we would have used you as a tool for destruction. You sought power—but not in the way we believed. You would have turned the blade we had given you against us. But Primal nature demands aether and prayer; both of which all of Ishgard could have given you in so much excess that you would have won. So why did you not?”

Ryne put a hand over her mouth. She was thinking of something similar—and Meteor understood what she was thinking about. 

Had Zodiark turned to temper those untempered, perhaps He would have won against Hydaelyn. But if the Unsundered were to be believed, large chunks of the remaining population were untempered even as reality and their very souls were severed evenly in the wake of Zodiark’s loss. With actual people at their core, perhaps these two Primals hesitated with mindlessly tempering those around them in an attempt to preserve what little remained. 

But Thordan was neither of these Primals. 

Out of the corners of their eyes they saw Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus both flinch. Ryne, too, narrowed her eyes suddenly, confusion plain on what of her face she hadn’t quite covered. 

The Vault towered over the rest of Ishgard. Even just the basilica was high enough that anything spread from here would envelop the entire city like a cloud. If Thordan wanted to temper the city, he but needed to do so from— 

Meteor opened their mouth. Lahabrea, too, finally flinched. 

But just as they unsheathed their weapon with a cry of “Oh no, you don’t!”, an arrow sailed past them. A dull thud. Hythlodaeus jolted up, wild red eyes scanning the area around him while Elidibus turned to look towards the once more thrown widely open gates. 

Ysayle and Haurchefant stood on either side of Ser Aymeric, who had apparently snatched a bow from a Temple Knight on his way here. Estinien had almost jokingly said that Aymeric had used to be a precise archer before he took up the sword, an archer trained as support for the oft flighty dragoons. It was what had made them such a good team in the end even as they were the sole survivors of their platoon, it had only made their friendship stronger because they knew they could count on one another. 

Aymeric lowered the bow. 

Thordan fell backwards, dissipating as he did so. 

The arrow that Aymeric had shot fell to the stone floor with a loud, final, deafening clatter. 

Sunlight was sparkling on the remaining ice pillars that had once been priests—Lahabrea had used their energy for his spells, citing that they would have had to be put down due to being tempered either way. Ryne, Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch all looked around and sighed in relief; whatever Thordan had been winding up to unleash in a last ditch effort to one-up them had dissipated along with the Primal. Meteor meanwhile dully remembered that they still had to play their role of merely a master of dark arts when Unukalhai threw them a dark look with his lips pressed into a thin line. 

Whatever victory celebrations there would be, they would very likely have to spend them in an infirmary once again. 

They put a hand on the Exarch’s shoulder after they let their sword drop once more. “I don’t… feel so well,” they groaned and raised the other hand to their head. 

“No one would, given what just transpired here,” Lahabrea said much too loudly to be merely speaking to them. Indeed, it sounded like there was an entire crowd following Aymeric, Haurchefant and Ysayle as they ran in. “It is not every day that one unearths millennia-old lies and sees a man turn into a monster that promptly tries to use its city against you. Outsiders though we may be, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn swore an oath to see the Primal threat eliminated. Eliminate it we did, but at what cost?”

They slowly sunk to their knees with another groan, helped down by the Exarch who knew what role they were trying to play. 

“Whether the cost was worth the reward remains to be seen,” Aymeric’s clear voice rang out through the basilica, “but what we do know is that both the Horde and the Church’s leaders have fallen. We have no replacement after what transpired here—and the Horde has not lifted wing or talon since the fall of Nidhogg. Brothers and sisters of Ishgard—the Dragonsong War’s final chapter, I believe, was just written in these halls.”

“By those outsiders?” asked someone in the crowd that was filtering into the basilica.

“Very much so. These outsiders, as you call them, bled with us, fought with us, shared the joy of victory with us—they grieved with us. They are not outsiders. They are people of Ishgard, and heroes who risked their lives for our sake and sanity against both Nidhogg and a Primal seeking to turn us into mindlessly praying Tempered besides.”

At first, there was loud muttering and mumbling that broke out. The disbelief was clear, but little by little the people pieced together what had happened in the recent days. The Lord Commander’s strange absence for a few days followed by the Archbishop suddenly vanishing. The Wards of House Fortemps running from one place to another despite just having assisted the Azure Dragoon with putting Nidhogg to the lance. 

Aymeric addressed the crowd once more, loudly, passionately, saying something or other about peace being within their grasp. It sounded like a less practised speech reminiscent of what he had eventually given at the peace summit that Nidhogg’s shade had so rudely interrupted. That this was their chance to truly bring about the peace that so many had died for. That none else would have to give their lives in a pointless war any longer. That their children and their children’s children could inherit an Ishgard where none would have to look at the skies in fear of both dragons and the church that held back the whole truth of the war for so long. 

Meteor knew that it would be rough from here on out. There were likely priests and inquisitors in the crowd that had somehow avoided being tempered. The highborn would not look upon Aymeric’s plans for Ishgard happily for quite a while until he won them over with his passions for a truly better Ishgard for all of them. But as they faked passing out with their fellow adventurers clustering around them worriedly, they heard that cheering broke out in the crowd. 

The crowd was cheering, led by Haurchefant and Ysayle, applauding Aymeric and the adventurers both. 

If only they could feel good about this. History was irreversibly off the tracks, they knew in their heart of hearts. Whatever happened from here on out, they could not look at it with optimism. 


	49. ACT VII: Beyond History's Weave, Part 1

Ryne was, for all intents and purposes, in a fantastic mood. Ishgard had always struck her as gloomy and too oppressive, but ever since that day in the Vault it did seem as if the city had grown lighter. The people seemed as if a burden had been lifted off their shoulders, as if the next day was going to be better than the last. She had been chatting with one of the stall-holders’ daughters, a girl around her and Gaia’s age back before all had gone to hell; leaned onto the counter and almost managed to haggle the price way down because the other girl got flustered somewhere down the line because she did not expect Ryne to start flirting back.

Around midday, however, Ryne caught someone slinking about the Pillars who had definitely been ordered a ridiculous amount of bedrest.

Like a snake, she struck when Elidibus’ back was turned and she, using her slight height advantage due to being a Hyur, slung her arms around his drooping shoulders.

“Now, now, Emissary—I do recall several people telling you that you needed rest.”

The surprised tension dropped off him, and she noted almost in delight that he appeared to have gotten some of his hard-to-spot pep back. He lashed his tail and flicked an ear against her cheek. “And I have gotten more than enough. If you would chastise someone for shirking their prescribed rest, do so with the Warrior of Light whenever they deign to reappear.”

“I have a whole speech prepared for them, make no mistake. But you have been rather miserable since around the time we went to the Hinterlands—with no obvious injury to show for it. Would you be so kind as to tell me why, Emissary?”

He looked around for a moment. There was not a soul in this particular part of the pillars right now, and rather than answering her right away, Elidibus instead pulled her into a portal. Ryne let out a surprised yelp, but she had had a feeling where he was taking her.

Much to her non-surprise, a moment later she found herself once again in a pristinely blue hallway somewhere in the Crystal Tower. It were the upper strata she knew, and Elidibus sucked in a deep, almost relieved breath.

“Quite simply put, I may have bitten off more than I can chew.”

Not too long ago, Elidibus would have ignored her question, Ryne realised. For better or worse, it seemed as if he had by now accepted their truce and accepted them all as partners for the time being—she had certainly noticed the almost relieved if exhausted glance he had shot Lahabrea when the Speaker had waved his bloodied hands at Ysayle and Haurchefant who both said that they had had no idea how intensely skilled he was with healing. She remembered the way history went, of course; Lahabrea should have been dead before Thordan had fallen. And no matter how much contempt Elidibus harboured for Lahabrea as a person, the fact that they were two of the four remainders of their people remained.

There was a certain amount of kinship that linked the Unsundered together that was _not_ their duty to the Primal that had tempered them.

The selfsame link that the fourth Unsundered appeared to treasure still, even if the other three refused to see it.

“What did you do?” she asked.

He dragged a hand down his face—he, Lahabrea and Unukalhai insisted on masks that at least covered the upper halves of their faces while Emet-Selch and Gerun clearly could not care less about who saw their faces. It was an interesting difference; knowing that those two in particular had spent more time with mortals than the other three.

“Gerun’s words made me think. Or rather, they made me wonder something about Primal influence. His position is not precedented, and unless I misremember you and yours eventually figured out a way to extract and eliminate the influence.”

Alisaie had taken what she had learned on the First, and all but immediately stormed off to Limsa Lominsa the first chance she got, Meteor had told them during their first return to Norvrandt. There had been more than enough instances of Tempered fighting off the influence but never being able to shed it entirely—much like those tainted by the light quite often fought back until it sapped them of their minds and energy until they wasted away till the day they inevitably transformed into monsters. Alisaie had gone and applied all she had learned from Beq Lugg and the people at the Inn to save a single Kobold.

Meteor had smiled for a moment, then had shaken their head and said that Ga Bu had been freed of Titan’s influence and that Unukalhai had gotten company in the then-deserted Solar for a while. The Exarch explained their fond look after they left; apparently this had not been the first time a so-called Beastman joined the Scions. And while the Sylph had died a tragic, wasteful death, the Kobold became fast friends with near everyone while helping with keeping the place in order.

Done remembering, all Ryne could do was nod. Much to her surprise, Elidibus shook his head. 

It was hard to gauge what he was thinking, and after a moment he let out a sigh. “Now then, he said that if the conflict of interest comes to a head, it kills his vessels.”

A jolt of horror ran through her. While nonchalant about it, the Fourteenth had described the experience as shockingly painful to the very base of his soul. While the grand majority of their party had taken over already vacated bodies, Elidibus in particular had made certain to _not_ kill the G’raha Tia of this timeline. Thus far. She threw a worried glance at him. “Oh no… did you…?”

He sighed vaguely. “I would like to reiterate that any changes to Primal nature were Lahabrea’s handiwork. We needed something efficient that would work without constant surveillance but that would sow enough chaos for us to reap eventually. He made adjustments after the disaster spearheaded by Igeyorhm with her help, and thusly were Primals as you know them created. Zodiark and by extension Hydaelyn _suggest_ rather than outright demand, a constant if not encouraging whisper. Zodiark’s has been silent for quite a while—which would align with the fact that apparently what power of His remained was focused on our wayward Seer rather than the rest of us.”

Ryne crossed her arms with a snort. “You went against the nature of your tempering and promptly paid the price in…?”

“Aether nausea.” When he saw her raise her eyebrows at that, he let out a heavy sigh. “Sundered, I swear… It is similar to aether sickness, but not quite as deadly or as easily recovered from. Simply put, certain concentrations of aether made me dizzy and incapable of working around them. Not uncommon for people from balanced places whenever they dip into others that are better aligned to one element—say, an Amaurotine leaving for the volcanic regions of Bodhum and Alexandria, or a Mor Dhonan travelling to the icy post-Calamity Ishgard. Such misalignments generally made the more aether sensitive people nauseous, lethargic, whereas aether sickness can plain kill them. Alas, the alignment that made me nauseous was—”

“Light?”

He shook his head once more. “Dark.”

“Wait, what? But that would mean that… you made yourself feel unwell?”

“Precisely so, doubled up with Emet-Selch, Gerun and Lahabrea’s presences, therefore leaving me near incapable of moving.”

She had noticed how dazed he had been in the Great Gubal Library, a far cry from the normally so confident and collected Emissary. He did genuinely seem better now, considering that he was flicking an ear at her in irritation and lashed his tail from one side to the other repeatedly.

“I am mostly over it by now. No intense urge to throw up my intestines whenever one of the Unsundered as much as glances into my general direction, at the very least. The body is as of yet unharmed, if that is what you are wondering—albeit its previous inhabitant has vacated the premise by now. It would seem that the stronger presence did in fact override the weaker instance of the same person just as I suspected.”

It took her a moment to understand what he was talking about. Once she did, she could not help but feel sorry for this timeline’s G’raha Tia—just as Meteor had said that they felt sorry for this timeline’s version of them, now that they were possessing that one’s corpse.

“That means… the only G’raha Tia left in this timeline is… the Exarch?”

With Krile en route to Eorzea by now, this would present a problem.

Elidibus pinched the bridge of his nose. “So he is. Worry not, we have been working on a solution regarding the Student of Baldesion.”

* * *

Meteor remained missing for the better part of a week and still had to yet reappear. Ryne had very quickly grown sick of the constant badgering that Haurchefant did—he kept insisting that injuries like that were nothing to be sneezed at, they should be resting, and so on and so on. Every morning. Without fail.

The fact that Lahabrea hadn’t strangled him yet was a minor miracle all by itself.

Then Haurchefant made the mistake to bring up that Lahabrea had rested and recovered rather well, something that Meteor was not doing. The whole resting period after taking care of Nabriales had been something that Lahabrea quite hated talking about, citing that the boredom had nearly succeeded in driving him just as mad as something he did not quite share had done long before.

Several people merely calmly watched as the Speaker swung his staff like a club and caught Haurchefant in the head with it.

“Now listen to me, dense lordling. While lauding your own skill is bad sportsmanship or whatever you empty-headed Elezen care about, Fury be my bleeding witness here; Meteor needed at best a day of rest to sleep off the sores. In case you failed to notice, the gaping hole in their chest did miss their heart, and as you certainly saw once I personally recovered enough to lend you a hand around Camp Dragonhead, I am fully capable of mending shattered bone and sewing torn tissue back together. Would you like me to go into _gruesome_ detail as to how precisely I patched them up ere we even had breakfast, or will you finally get it into your thick skull that Meteor and their healer know what is best for them?”

Somewhere behind her, she heard an amused giggle of sorts, followed by another voiced hurriedly asking if Speaker always had to be blunt and violent. Ryne turned her head slightly just in time to see Hythlodaeus shrug at Emmanellain and Honoroit.

“Truly? You believe all healers to be demure, polite little ladies who apologise for failing to prevent you getting hurt? I hear that Amdapori mages were quite skilled at torture because of their intricate knowledge of Spoken bodies and how to heal any sort of injury—the knowledge to mend can be reversed to the power of agonising pain rather easily, and Speaker merely is not afraid of letting people know just how dangerous he can be.” Another shrug. “Although it seems that stubborn insistence runs in your family. Make no mistake, Lord Emmanellain, ‘tis a boon as much as it proves to be a curse. In any case, the needless fretting over Meteor is quite pointless. They are an adult. They will stay put when necessary. That, or Speaker will tie them to the bed and slowly unravel every nerve he stitched back together with copious amounts of aether and re-emerge smiling with gore-stained hands and a necklace made of their shattered ribs.”

“Ugh… point taken. There goes my appetite.”

* * *

The stumbling blocks of rebuilding a nation mostly passed them by. Ryne at some point grew bored of Ishgard and found herself returning to Mor Dhona—and not long thereafter in the Rising Stones.

She had just about left a strategy meeting between the Exarch and Elidibus where they had gravely discussed the necessity of the Warriors of Darkness and the Word of the Mother, lest the First truly fell to a Flood of Light. Now she found herself sitting with quite a few adventurers that Tataru had hired to search for the missing Scions—most of them had also returned to the Rising Stones for their general search reports. Sitting amidst the adventurers and the Domans she felt as if she had never left the Crystarium.

“And what’s he get for his troubles? A bloody jar of pickles! I would’ve skinned them merchants then and there, but seven hells, that boy’s got the patience of a saint!” As if to underline the sentence, the Miqo’te threw an arm around Arenvald’s shoulders, to which the other adventurer replied with a surprisingly loud laugh.

“Give me a break; I was most certainly not expecting a reward—and you absolutely did not complain the slightest at the campfire that evening when you gorged yourself upon _my_ reward like a starved hyena!”

Heroes of other stories, Meteor often called the adventurers with the Scions. People who certainly did not want for bravery but somehow they avoided getting into too much glorious trouble. They would come and give it their all when summoned, some would even go on to become notorious for their own tales, but it were tales that Meteor never truly learned of. Weaker incarnations of Primals were taken care of by elite adventuring groups that had the Echo—only when one such party was slain or escaped by the skin of their teeth did the Alliance call for the Scion’s aid. It was a surprisingly efficient way to deal with threats; the Scions were always called when new Primals emerged or they happened upon them before the Alliance, and once enough knowledge had been gathered those other adventuring teams could take care of everything while the Warriors of Light and the Scions were absent.

“Still, side hustle aside… we have combed most corners of Alliance territory by now,” Arenvald sighed after a moment. “My own venture into the depths of the lost capital of Amdapor coincided quite nicely with another group unearthing the secrets of Nym and its marine, and there have been rumours that someone has set foot in Yafaem recently. If we are to find the other Scions, I am starting to believe we must needs look where the Lifestream gets closest to the surface… and not necessarily in Alliance territory.”

“Eorzea is vast,” Ryne said softly. One vein that Arenvald was talking about was in the Dravanian Forelands. Another vein that was deliberately broken into was where the Antitower had been built in the Hinterlands. One had been near the Isle of Bal. “Heavens help us should Flow have carried Thancred beyond Baelsar’s Wall.”

“Or to Doma,” a new voice said, and several heads turned to the entrance.

A surprised murmur went through the assortment of former Crystal Braves. Riol in particular practically jumped from his chair, followed by Alianne rather quickly.

The Exarch had quietly confessed that be believed that Meteor had been tampering with the timeline long before most of them caught up to the changes—never drastically enough to truly make a difference as opposed to them all but keeping Lahabrea captive until he agreed to join them, but still changes. Lady Ysayle and Lord Haurchefant were, however, definitely not the first time they had swooped someone out of Thal’s iron embrace.

Ryne however made a point in also jumping to her feet. “You’re alive!” she exclaimed and joined the former Braves in running towards the newcomer who was not quite a newcomer.

Wilred merely awkwardly scratched the back of his neck and raised the other hand in a feeble, embarrassed greeting.

“By the Twelve, boy, we had thought you dead!”

Meteor must have given him an excuse of some sort, and Wilred indeed merely said that he had embarrassingly gotten lost all on his own. By the time he had made it back to civilisation, Buscarron had made sure to tell him what had happened. Wilred had thus spent quite a while in the Shroud, at first with his fellow Ala Mhigans at Quarrymill until they departed and then with an assortment of what Laurentius had always called the forest’s scum. People beholden not to the Elementals but their own rules.

Eventually the Domans had found him not too long ago when he had returned to the Druthers for a spell, and thusly learned of what had happened in the meanwhile.

“Destroyer be my witness, had I learned of any of this earlier, I would have returned sooner. Better late than never, I suppose?”

Laughter, warm and welcoming just as her first visit to the Crystarium had been. The people had received the Oracle warmly, like someone who had always been part of the city rather than a recently rescued captive who was now under the protection of the Crystal Exarch and one of his esteemed guests. While she and Thancred did not stay long for fear of being tracked, the few occasions that saw them return to the Crystarium before the Warrior of Light arrived had always been just as warm.

This time she wasn’t the one being received however, and after a moment of consideration even the adventurers hired specifically to look for the missing Scions joined in to welcome Wilred back. She beamed at him, pulled him along when the entire cluster of people started to return to their seats.

Heroes of other stories, but she was perfectly content listening to them as Wilred recounted everything over a glass of something or other that Higiri handed him and everyone else. Even if the getting lost part was a lie, everything afterwards had been his own story, and she was surprisingly content listening to it. It reminded her of the evenings she spent at the markets with Gaia, listening to travellers and merchants alike telling their little stories.

* * *

“Excuse me? Sir?”

“Would you like me to call you girl, Scion?”

“Err….”

Truth be told, she had little to no idea how to interact with the Seer. Unukalhai had already gently but forcefully rebuffed any talk about also having a version of the Blessing of Light and instead preferred to talk about other, unrelated things. Emet-Selch was best entertained with knowledge she should rightfully not have, Lahabrea was best left alone unless it was strictly professional. The Exarch and Meteor she knew and trusted deeply, and Elidibus was an ally who was slowly opening up for better or for worse.

But there were many questions that burned under her tongue in regards to Hythlodaeus—if only she knew how to talk to him. Any attempts at being polite like this were rebuffed, any professional approach was coldly ignored, and he was absolutely keeping any and all people here at arm’s length. If she didn’t know any better, she would have assumed that he was about a loud sentence away from fleeing despite his insistence that he was through with running.

And even though he clearly still considered the other Unsundered his brethren, there were no attempts to approach them from his side other than the occasional scathing word.

“Wh-What would you like me to call you, then?”

The Exarch’s red eyes were always warm despite how shockingly bright they were. That red was unearthly and now that she knew what those eyes meant she had a newfound appreciation for how gentle he was whenever he wasn’t being mischievous.

The Seer’s red eyes however were dull and cold and unfocused most of the time—and on the rare occasion he did not stare at the world through the aetheric lens, they became even colder due to how pointed his glares were.

Ryne wasn’t entirely sure what his expression was suppose to convey; she only knew that he was staring at her without his sharp aethersight.

After a moment he rolled his eyes. “Call me Seer still. The proper title is much too stiff if you ask me, and my given name, well. The less it is used, the better. But you are not addressing me merely to ask my name, are you.”

Not a question. It was an invitation, and Ryne nodded. There was nothing she had to be scared of; the Fourteenth was on her side and not some ambiguously distant goal that might turn against her in the end. If anything she had to fear his inaction due to his predicament in the middle of combat.

This was, however, not the time to muse about any of this. Several questions, and she had the chance to ask one of them. Knowing how history would go assuming that naught else changed, there was one thing in particular she had been wondering lately.

Meteor had said that Minfilia and another surviving Student of Baldesion had shared a type of Echo. Which, as Emet-Selch posited once, was fairly common but never quite as heeded in the past. Premonition glance, a sort of Echo that let people see what was unchangeable as long as it was related to them. An extremely uncommon and often bothersome mutation of that Echo was foresight, the very Echo that the Unsundered claimed that the Seer had. Fitting, considering his title—although Emet-Selch joked that the actual title was Overseer and the prefix had been dropped because of this particular Gerun being clairvoyant.

“The Echo. Your Echo, I mean. I have been wondering for the longest time how exactly it worked. Claiming that it needed time to adjust to the changes, and what-not…?”

He blinked several times. Then he sighed. Loudly.

“The details will bore you, Oracle. They bore everyone. But to summarise it; I believe it is best explained by going back to the Exarch’s explanation of timelines. How changes occur every time a decision is made? Premonition glance lets you see to a choice that splits the path. Foresight lets you know what the choices are and lets you see beyond the bend, further and further and further until the very end. The problem is, it only lets you see the most likely outcome. Therefore I could theoretically tell you in excruciating detail how the path as it is right now, changes all included, will still lead to the same outcome: my aetherial guts strewn all over the pasture and two deities risen to fight. Theoretically… were it not for the bigger problem. The bigger problem with foresight is, unfortunately, should a less likely choice be selected, it takes a while to adjust.” His expression grew darker. “The fact that I know the outcome is mildly concerning, considering that I do not know which additional choices lead there. I know not the path, but I know the outcome….”

Perhaps subconsciously, he had put a hand on his chest while speaking—as she had assisted with, she knew what was needed to kill an Unsundered. A piercing blow of concentrated energy that shattered the soul just as if it had been sundered, although it was unclear whether or not the Unsundered would have been reborn Sundered in their abandoned timeline eventually. It was one of the mysteries they had left behind and that was impossible to learn even should they ever return to that timeline.

Ryne nodded. “Might I… ask if you knew what would happen before the Sundering?”

His hand dropped and his eyes snapped back to her. Then a crooked grin split his face, both incredibly malicious-looking and unfathomably sad at the same time. “I could not see beyond the veil of blood, fire, and darkness. Capricious as fate can be, a friend of mine would have said, it did not permit me to see what would happen. As if trying to stop me from influencing the outcome, as if to see whether we would take this lying down awaiting death or if we would fight back even with fate itself seemingly stacked against us.”

“And… afterwards?”

“I was blinded. I knew neither path nor outcome—all I knew was that I could not bear the choices made that led to this point even if I could not care less for the heart. I could not bear more sacrifice for so petty a squabble. And see where it got me. Foresight is a curse, Oracle—be glad you were not burdened with it.”

She wanted to apologise for asking him that, but he gave her no choice. As swiftly and as lightly as he moved about, he left the room.

The door fell shut with a soft click, and Ryne was left standing there, wondering if they could truly deal with history from here on out if not even the supposed clairvoyant could see what would happen.


	50. ACT VII: Beyond History's Weave, Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh christ is this really chapter 50  
> what the hell
> 
> i started this fic when my laptop finally started getting worse and worse keyboard-wise (yall see how much i type) and this one marks not only number 50 but also the first one posted from a gift from my friends that made me fucking lie down sobbing for a couple days
> 
> if theres any missing letters its not my keyboard being stuck bc its old and overused, its because im a dumbass and am not entirely used to the new keyboard yet
> 
> give it up for chapter 50 and my friends, everyone

They had done things that certainly were more suicidal than this. Leviathan, Ravana, Bismarck, storming in and about and around, accepting challenges from jovial Primals and people who wanted them dead left and right. Meteor had hopped chasms with the help of people who very selflessly ensured they made the jump while paying not heed to the fact that the person helping would be the one tumbling into the abyss instead. Such seemed to be the lot that those with the Blessing of Light, however feeble it may be, were forced to suffer no matter what.

All the sacrifices that saw Ardbert and his friends succeed only for the success to turn on them. The Oracle of Light’s gentle voice telling him that his time had not yet come, and then finally turning into one such person who ensured they crossed the gap.

Unukalhai had suffered a dreary system shock that reminded him of the value of even just a single life, be it an enemy he abhorred or an ally he adored. Regula van Hydrus may not have left much of an impact on Meteor themself but his bloodied hands and broken blade haunted Unukalhai even if the boy from the Thirteenth played it off once the shock subsided. Varis zos Galvus in turn also seemed to lose a steady pillar of support, which left him at the mercy of the Ascians that soon turned to Garlemald once it became clear that Meteor was not so easily defeated. While not a soul other than Gaius and Estinien had witnessed what had truly happened in there, even those two had missed what had happened prior to Zenos turning his weapon on his own father.

Thus, perhaps, they had done more suicidal things.

Fighting with Arenvald at the supposed summit of the people of Gyr Abania that Lyse had invited everyone to had taught them how to properly dispel attempts at Tempering. It had shown them that despite all, they had ever been a sharpened weapon ready to be thrown while Arenvald and his lesser powers learned how to do things in crafty ways.

Emet-Selch had described the Unsundereds’ powers the same way—that Elidibus was powerful because he was crafty, that Emet-Selch was given the gift of immense strength, and Lahabrea had worked both together.

They looked around the place, their blade still at Regula’s neck. Ever the true warlord, the legatus certainly did not betray any fear. The legion, however, was shocked into stillness. A single savage, they likely thought to themselves, should not have all that power.

“I know why you and your legion are here, legatus,” they said into the tense quiet aboard that airship that had nearly shot them out of the sky. “And I know you are not liable to believe a single savage who has time and time bested the best of your empire. I am not here to assassinate you at the cost of my own life, for surely the very moment I cut your throat your legion will shoot me down. No, I am here to offer you a temporary alliance; I would ask for your help with regards to the Warring Triad. See if this technology is the very one you came here to claim while I dispose of the Primals held within.”

“You would think me foolish enough to assume for even just a moment that you speak the truth?”

Meteor shook their head. “No, certainly not. But I would also not think you foolish enough to decline such an offer if it helps you further the cause of your Emperor. After all, you outnumber me. Keep a soldier with their weapon pointed at my back with their finger on the trigger for all I care, van Hydrus, but the fact remains that the facility barred your entrance and I offer you… entry.”

* * *

They remembered they had once been terrified out of their mind when face to face with Sephirot, the mumbled reminders of Primal nature and the fact that there were merely two Primals that also earned the title ‘elder’… and one of which had caused the very Calamity that had seen them leave their home. Krile, Urianger and Unukalhai spent a good amount of time analysing data they unearthed after the fact, tomestones that carried additional information about the Warring Triad that had helped the Scions formulate plans in the very unlikely event that the long-forgotten were summoned again. Data that had made it through another Calamity, was carried safely through the ages and even time twice over. A reminder of people that would never exist in the same way again.

Standing against the Fiend once again, there was no fear left in their body. It would have certainly helped had there been anyone nearby as Krile and Unukalhai had been, but there was only so much they could do. Granting the Garleans access to the cameras within the facility far enough away from the Triad Control was already dangerous enough as was. But they were here for more than the simple reason of dispatching the Triad before they ever became an issue—they were stupid at times, yes, but they were not stupid enough to march into a foolhardy plan without a rather significant reason.

In the past, the salvation of the star had been enough of a reason for them to march and march and march and run themself ragged, but by this point they had to admit… knowing history made for some interesting priorities.

Sephirot fell with little issue.

The awed murmurs from the conscripts was more than enough to prompt them to grin at the Garleans. Perhaps this was their part of the story where they grew too cocky and inevitably had their hubris-riddled downfall, but they had to admit they felt fantastic seeing the awestruck Garleans.

Van Hydrus, meanwhile, stayed professionally quiet. He seemed lost in thought for quite a while, and even forgot to have another soldier follow Meteor with a gun pointed at their back.

It wasn’t until later that Regula spoke again, when they had returned to the temporary castrum that they had built and then rebuilt. There was still the occasional scorch mark, and they had to internally hand it to Lahabrea—the Speaker was thorough even through his obvious insanity.

“I feel like I have to apologise for my companion’s wanton arson,” they jokingly said and looked over their shoulder once the legatus was done directing the legion about.

“… A question, if I may.”

Meteor raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “Technically I _am_ at your mercy, Legatus van Hydrus.”

“You have your little pack of adventurers and Scions of the Seventh Dawn. Why approach us on your own?”

In the past, they had nearly been too slow to prevent the Demon from rising at full strength. The unsung hero of that story was its once villain Regula van Hydrus, who not only gave his life for a supposed enemy but who also with that sacrifice ensured that as many of his men as possible made it out while also giving the Scions the edge they needed against Zurvan.

But the more they had observed what came after while piecing history back together with Ryne, Elidibus and the Exarch after their arrival here, the more they started to realise one thing regarding Garlemald in particular. For someone lauded as a strategist of no equal, Emperor Varis made several missteps even before the approximate time that Elidibus admitted he had roused Emet-Selch and then gone on to pretend he was Zenos. The grossest misstep of which was giving Zenos full control of both Doma and Ala Mhigo.

Then again, Garlemald was a hungering hound ready to devour itself, from what Emet-Selch admitted freely once pressed. There was tension that he had deliberately sown and that was ready for the reaping at any time; most pressing of all the still fairly recent war of succession. Attempts on lives, often as young as a bloody child who was always sort of wrong but most pressingly was a possible candidate for the line of succession. Meteor had wanted to throttle him by the time he finished explaining what was wrong with Garlemald from the moment he set the empire up, but it only made Varis’ extremely strange attempt at telling the Alliance who truly ran the Garlean Empire behind the Ascians’ backs all the more stranger.

He had almost sounded like a man who had nothing else to lose beyond the cocky grin.

Varis’ missteps started with the conclusion of the Warring Triad fiasco, although the Ascians merely started biting at his heels when Ala Mhigo and Doma were freed.

“Had I come here with allies by my side, my intents would not have been as clear.”

“They are still rather mysterious, all things considered—you could just as easily have come here with your allies and done it faster than we would have noticed.”

With Unukalhai no longer meddling with everything and attempting to get Regula van Hydrus killed inside the Aetherochemical Research Facility, certainly. They shrugged vaguely, a sigh nearly escaping them as they did so. “True. But there is more to my approaching you than I said at first—I wanted to prove my intents before I brought it up.”

“Oh?”

Meteor waved a hand through the air. “Let us dispatch the Goddess and the Demon first. Those Eikons cannot be suffered to live, and my reason for approaching you can wait until after you obtain what you came here to get.”

They could almost swear that behind the mask he was raising an eyebrow.

Not that they could see that much.

* * *

Not having Meracydian thralls break free and loosen Sophia’s bindings made for a rather strange encounter.

She sounded befuddled, her voice drowsy and almost confused. She was no less ferocious once they drew their weapon, of course, but there was a strange tone to her voice that barely made any sense. Balance was cold, unforgiving, equilibrium something that cut down good and bad alike. Her voice had cracked when they had withstood her judgement in the past; no amount of clones and fancy flashing attacks, tilts, and whatever else she threw against them throwing them quite literally off. When the Goddess had fallen in the past, Unukalhai had been surprisingly tense, a tension that had returned when he was made a part of the Scions and started evaluating the data from a Goddess-related tomestone. Eventually Alisaie had all but squeezed it out of him once Ga Bu had left the Solar to help Alianne out in the main hall.

Balance as a concept was unforgiving, Unukalhai had said quietly, but that was only true balance. Unforgiving and almost contradictory—the Goddess would have judged the people who had refused to summon her just as harshly as she would have judged Allag. Even though she had been summoned to save the people no matter their desire to summon her; after all it was only Allag that threatened the balance. It was as if there was something about Primal nature that they still did not quite understand, and Unukalhai had realised much too late with no small amount of horror that Elidibus had always preached balance—but it had never been true balance as Unukalhai believed it was.

“You,” Sophia breathed, “how is one of Allag’s henchmen in equilibrium?”

“Dunno. Maybe I’m not one of Allag’s henchmen. Not that you’d know.”

Warrior of Light. Warrior of Darkness.

They wouldn’t call themself someone in equilibrium. They still belonged firmly to the light, something they would never give up. But to the Primal’s eyes they appeared as some sort of horrifying creature that had managed to attain the balance she preached. Or at least they appeared to be just that in her still drowsy eyes.

* * *

For how standoffish and often blunt he could be, they would never truly forget how still Unukalhai had been after Zurvan had spent his energy for the time being. There was something abhorrent about the idea of a child with the Echo being forced to fight that continued on to the Oracles of Light that came before Ryne—especially since in Unukalhai’s own words, he had barely managed to understand the fundamentals of magic before he was being hounded by aetherstarved former heroes that once shared the same gift as him. Meteor had been an adult by the time they left their home, and most of the other Echo-bearers had at the very least been near the cusp of adulthood.

Unukalhai had, without so much as blinking or even changing his expression from a forlorn, worryingly distant smile, said that he truly did not remember what age he had been when a voice echoed through his head and told him that he needed to hear, feel, think. He may have been seven for all he recalled—which was not much. All he remembered were these horrid creatures that retained sense even through the transformation, and who played with their prey, that laughed as he ran and told him to grow stronger so he might as well make a more interesting meal than just a squealing child like all the others they had devoured. Voidsent were the active counterpart to the pristinely still and quiet for the most part Sin Eaters, all of them tricksters that craved some sort of chaos that they arbitrarily chose.

He had realised the gravity of a death when Regula van Hydrus saved his life and paid for it with his own. No child should have ever had to lose their grip on the weight of a life in the first place—something that, assuming the Ascian still had a shred of conscience left at that point, Elidibus had agreed with enough to extend a hand to the boy as a last attempt at both saving the world and saving a single Warrior of Light.

This time, the Demon did not get his cut of flesh. No minds were enthralled for the Warrior of Light had learned how to provisionally shield an Echo-less person from a Tempering for but enough heartbeats to get them out of the facility in time. One person lowered the wards and bindings and then left the facility—they knew that Regula van Hydrus was not fool enough to waste the opening they had given him.

And thus, blade against blade, the Demon once more fell before them. Dully, almost agonisingly, they remembered that by this time they had still fought with a lance and wild, sweeping movements. The Demon had fallen not long after the Dragonsong War ended—no rest for the righteous, as some said. The euphoria of winning a war was soon followed by the admittedly sombre victory over the Warring Triad; a terrifying tale of loss and misjudgements from Unukalhai underlining just how terrible the end of the Thirteenth had been.

His tale had made hearing that the Flood of Light would consume the First if Ardbert and the others did not succeed in causing an Ardor all the more horrifying.

This time there would be no Garleans who would carry the body of their fellows out of the Aetherochemical Research Facility. No one would bear the body of Regula van Hydrus back to the capital. The VIth was more or less fine, not counting whatever losses they had suffered from Lahabrea’s little arson stunt and the creatures and machines that still roamed Azys Lla.

They half expected hundreds of weapons pointed at them when they left the facility. Others would have killed them on the spot once the deed was done.

But there was only one soul waiting for them outside, the very man who had disabled the bindings not too long ago.

They wiped a bit of soot off their face.

Regula van Hydrus merely crossed his arms.

“Would I be correct to presume that you wished to show me simply how horribly fallible these contraptions to encase Primals are?” If he was shaken, his voice did not betray him.

“More or less, yes. You could easily have become the next van Darnus and the Demon could have easily become the next Dreadwyrm. You noticed it, then?”

“That there were deliberate errors in the technology that could be exploited by certain parties? Yes.”

They nodded. “Figured. Two of my fellows are rather invested in Allagan technology and said something seemed off when we were on our way through the Facility for the first time.”

Van Hydrus shook his head. “The half-Garlean mage being one of them, I presume. Now tell me, Warrior of Light—your ulterior move.”

They shifted their weight from one foot to the other and exhaled loudly. The ice on their armour had long since melted, and the water had washed away most of the soot. Zurvan truly lived up to his name, having crawled from the flames of hell and through the thickest layer of ice down below to come hound the mortal realm above. They closed their eyes for a moment as if to feign a moment to sort their thoughts.

There was a reason why they had all but vanished without an explanation to their allies. While truth be told they should have at least warned them or told them where they were going, there was one person in particular who never should have heard a thing about what they were planning. Emet-Selch would have either thrown out his back laughing at them or would have deliberately messed with their chance depending on his mood.

They snapped their eyes open again and stared at Regula van Hydrus with what they hoped looked like a deadly serious expression.

“I needed you to understand what was going on, yes. I would have let you take it should you still desire so now. But, Legatus, what I came here to do was to win your trust just enough to ask one question. I know I am one of the public enemies of the empire. But there is something of great import that I would need to discuss with Emperor Varis.”

A long, long pause.

Then, a snort. “And let us assume I bring you there, secretly, with my entire legion complicit in the crime of smuggling in an enemy of the state to speak with His Radiance. What then, Warrior of Light? How do you propose you will get out of Garlemald?”

This time, Meteor smiled at him. “Oh, I am an expert in discreetly making my way out of things. It is the getting into them that I have issues with. Trouble finds me, but I cannot seem to be able to get into it deliberately. Which unfortunately leaves me quite skilled in the vanishing act but not the… appearing act, I suppose.”

“Are you perchance addled?”

“Oh no. Unfortunately for everyone involved, I am rather stable.”

Once again, a long pause.

Then Regula van Hydrus let out another snort. “Well, I cannot say that you failed to catch my interest. And you certainly already had His Radiance’s due to your gift. Having witnessed it in motion more or less from close range as both your ally and your enemy, I cannot quite say with certainty that I trust you, but I would be doing His Radiance a disservice if I did not take you up on your ridiculous request.”

They grinned at him.

Only just about now they also realised that he had stopped calling them a ‘savage’.

* * *

According to the Exarch, in the timeline of the Eighth Calamity, they had marched all the way to the capital. Had Elidibus not gone on to wipe out the Populares in a fell swoop, Alphinaud would have arrived here similar to how they did now. For what could potentially be seen as high treason, the VIth was surprisingly complacent in letting them come with them—unbeknownst to them but very well known to van Hydrus, they pointed out which ones had been fed into his legion to undermine him and the Emperor’s wishes.

It wasn’t as if they spent all their time metaphorically sharpening their edges so they could impale whatever their allies pointed them at next. Meteor was more of a subtle worker—someone who enjoyed going through the files and shelves to find what they needed and then used that as a weapon. Granted, they also enjoyed combat. But apparently all the time they had spent with Alphinaud and Tataru in particular had started rubbing off on them by the time they returned from the First with the Scions’ souls in their vessels.

The Exarch’s reports and what Estinien and Gaius told the Alliance had them expect a prototype Weapon stashed away somewhere. It seemed as if production on those had not quite yet started—but then again, perhaps that had been started after losing territory saw the empire on the back foot.

Elidibus had truly made quite an impressive opponent that would either set the world ablaze in sudden re-conquest or that would go down so horrendously that it would bring ruin to the world. Which it did at one point that saw the Exarch sent back in time and to another world altogether.

Other than that, it certainly was what they had always imagined from the imperial palace. Cold steel, cold lights. Cold everything, despite how overwhelmingly technological it looked compared to even Allag at this point.

They remembered the parley at the front lines as if it had happened just the other day. The way that Varis had coldly played his hand and nearly incited the Alliance into trading blows at the table that was supposed to broker peace. How wide his grin had grown when they had finally asked the right question. Part of them had desperately wished for Krile to be here so her Echo could help them figure out if they had imagined that short flash of relief when he admitted that Ascians had built the Garlean Empire. As if something had lifted off his shoulders.

Elidibus had hesitantly admitted that yes, Varis had already been under the process of breaking and that his actions had only broken the man down further. An excellent strategist, faced with something he could not outplay and that danced around his palace wearing the dead bodies of his dead son and his dead and much-reviled grandfather. And then the reports that the Exarch found in a blood-drenched journal, that Emperor Varis had been dead by the time Black Rose had been released.

Still, they played by the rules that van Hydrus had given them. They were to be brought before Emperor Varis not as an ally—but not as a prisoner either. Not someone to trust entirely but not someone untrustworthy either.

They did not even pretend to listen to the report. They knew what it contained, after all. How the Warring Triad was indeed there, how the technology had indeed bound them in place for many years. But then van Hydrus went into the failures and deliberate errors of the systems that would soon see these Primals released, how likely the same nooks and crannies saw van Darnus and nan Garlond fall under the Dreadwyrm’s thrall without anyone but certain people who were silenced or fled noticing such.

Cid had known, but they were not going to tell Emperor Varis that much. It was much better for Cid to be merely wanted dead as a traitor rather than alive for Calamity-related questioning. Any love he had held for the land of his birth had gone by now. For all intents and purposes, Cid may as well have been born on Eorzean soil considering how much he had come to appreciate these lands.

A long moment of silence made them realise that the conversation had come to a halt and they looked at Emperor Varis.

“I am given to understand that of all people, one of Eorzea’s vaunted Eikon-slayers is responsible for the inhuman feat of downing not one but three Eikons of such strength and then _requesting_ to be brought here?”

“Yes, Your Radiance,” they said with as much of a neutral expression and tone as they could muster. “I care not if this means that I will spend the last days before my inevitable execution on Garlean soil locked in a cell—this information needed to be brought to you not only by Legatus van Hydrus. Binding technology is not the way to stop Eikons. It is too easily exploited by the Enthralled that may be building it. And,” they folded their hands and looked at Emperor Varis rather pointedly to gauge his reaction to their next words, “even if you ensure that the contraptions are built far from eikonic influence, there is no way of avoiding Ascian eyes.”

A pause. His lips were a thin line by now but otherwise his expression was unreadable.

Then, suddenly, “Out. I would speak with this savage on their own”. 

Regula van Hydrus hesitated, but Emperor Varis nodded at him barely noticeably.

Hells, Meteor went as far as asking van Hydrus to wait for a moment and handed him their weapon as if to underline the fact they did not mean to appear threatening.

The door fell shut.

“You would give your own weapon away so freely, Warrior of Light?”

“Oh, a weapon can be replaced assuming I walk free. Should your Legatus truly care, he should be disassembling the weapon by now and will be finding that it is a simple weapon of Ishgardian steel and naught else. Besides, I genuinely merely came here to talk no matter the cost, even should that cost be my own life.” 

They had a plan, of course. Should Varis execute them where they stood, they would pull the same trick that Elidibus had had. Their demise at the hands of the Empire they would wave off as propaganda to lessen Alliance morale, which in turn would sow confusion in the Empire. After all they were an Ascian. There was no talking around that fact any longer, especially now that they were possessing their alternate timeline’s dead body. It was still bizarre to think about but it had spurred them into action quicker than they planned on jumping to it. They had initially wanted to at the very least involve Ryne and Unukalhai, but… here they were. 

Should Varis execute them, they would simply repossess their body as if to underline that there was no avoiding Ascians. 

“Now then, since you sent the Legatus out, I may as well come forward with why I am here. I have reason to believe that even the eikonic influence was planned and executed by Ascians in the time of the Allagan Empire. Hells, the more I learn about Allag in conjunction with Ascians, the more I am starting to believe that Allag… and Garlemald… were founded by an Ascian. I came here to ask you precisely that.” 

Once again, he was pressing his lips together into a thin line. His voice was somehow still even and betrayed not whatever turmoil he was likely in internally when he spoke. “Assuming that you will have to pay the price for so brazenly requesting to be brought here. Assume that I execute you in this very room, Warrior of Light. Would the information you gain serve any one savage, then?” 

“Of course it would not,” they said. “But I cannot very well let the Empire retrace the same mistakes that Allag did, whether it is my enemy or not. I am not here to forge an alliance or a truce. I merely wish to know if you know of any Ascian influence within Garlemald.” 

“And what should I give you confirmation that there is and let you go, Warrior of Light? Will you and your Scions come running to Garlemald via a spy network we have yet to unearth and nip the problem in the bud, then walk back out and continue sitting there beyond Baelsar’s Wall with Eikons haunting your lands? Garlemald was founded—” 

“With the declaration that Eikons could not be suffered to exist by your very grandfather, the late Emperor Solus zos Galvus, yes.” They realised a moment too late that they had interrupted the Emperor. “… Beg your forgiveness, Your Radiance. It was not my intention to interrupt you. Me and my Scions will not come running to Garlemald unless you invited us, this I swear. Ascians and Eikons are our concern, but we are not foolish enough to ignore international relations as brazenly as that.” 

Of course he knew that by now the Alliance’s leaders knew about Ascians and were on the lookout for anything they deemed strange enough to call the Scions. The Ivy had forwarded as much through her network before the Crystal Braves apprehended her, after all. His expression remained neutral and set as he thought, and Meteor desperately hoped they had not blown their chance with that interruption. 

“And how have you arrived at the conclusion that Allag and perhaps even Garlemald were founded by Ascians, of all things?” 

They nodded. “Perhaps not by Ascians directly,” they said calmly, remembering how Urianger had stretched a hand out to say that the face of the stranger approaching them was in many an imperial history book. “But certainly under Ascian influence. One of my fellow Warriors of Light is a historian specialised in Allagan history in particular, and he has been finding concerning parallels between Empires in the past that all led to Calamity and the way the Ascians operate. It is not limited to Allag but the Garlemald-born we know all agree that certain things align too well with his hypothesis. And not merely those—I have heard direct descendants of Mhachi and Amdapori survivors who dedicate their lives to studying history proclaim that Amdapor and Mhach, despite not being empires, also fit into the equation.” 

Varis’ eyes betrayed the fact that he looked at the report penned by van Hydrus on his way back to Garlemald. Something was written on that paper that made the Emperor relax slightly—it was barely more than a small movement of his shoulders, but Meteor noticed it. 

It took them quite a good amount of self-restraint to keep them from cheering loudly when Varis leaned back a little and closed his eyes for a brief moment. 

“I shall give you the answer you desire, but be aware that it is inconclusive at best and you will not be leaving Garlemald with them unless you can somehow stage a vanishing act. Which, given the contents of this report, you are incapable of doing. You are a fighter, not a mage. Are those terms acceptable to you, Warrior of Light?” 

Ah, a little bit of insubordination for the greater good. They would have to find a way to thank Regula van Hydrus for his dedication to both his Emperor and the fact that he also submitted to the same mentality that Gaius van Baelsar did. After all, what was the point of conquering land if there were no people to be ruled? And the Eorzeans in particular would be so much more liable to submit should the champions of the realm be subjugated by a legion. Thus he had ensured their escaping vanishing act being a surprise that he could not have foreseen either after watching their combat. “Yes, Your Radiance.” 

Varis raised an eyebrow—he was likely surprised that they accepted his terms so flippantly. Another way of ensuring that van Hydrus was not punished too much for his failure to see that they could cast some sort of magicks that helped them escape. 

Still, he did not go back on his words. 

“Very well. My grandfather may have received outside help from strangers that were, surprisingly, never quite present at court. Given what has recently happened with Gaius van Baelsar breaking away and taking the XIVth to Eorzea with little warning, preamble, or even permission… yes, I do believe that Ascians were very well involved with laying our foundation. Know, however, that it is my intention to uproot their influence—once that is done, mark my words, we will find a way to undo the Eikon threat.” He breathed in slowly and exhaled just as slowly. “I am given to understand there was indeed an Ascian working alongside van Baelsar?” 

“Yes, Your Radiance,” they said and shook their head slightly. “The threat has been dealt with, and since then we have found a way to permanently lay the Ascians low. Should you forward an invitation to my allies once you find the root of the corruption, they will most certainly help you extinguish that flame of darkness.” 

A slow, very slight nod was all they received in answer. 

Hells, they almost beamed brightly when van Hydrus was called back in and told to put them in solitary confinement until Emperor Varis figured out what to do with them. They had sown the first proper seeds of both doubt in the Empire as a whole within its own Emperor and also laid a very rough foundation for an understanding that the Alliance and the Scions both would never have summoned Shinryu. 


	51. ACT VII: Beyond History's Weave, Part 3

He coerced the kid into making him a bullet point list of the supposed twists and turns that history had taken in the original timeline. Well, perhaps not coerced. Emet-Selch was far above such things. But the kid, as much as Elidibus claimed him to be different, had a peculiar similarity with someone Emet-Selch once knew inside out: an inherent desire for causing some sort of problem. The key difference between Hythlodaeus-before-Gerun and Unukalhai was, however, that Hythlodaeus was far from malicious. No, his intents had always been mischievous at worst—swapping the Professor’s sugar with salt and thus causing him to choke on his tea mid-lecture, leading to several broken bits and pieces, a toppled chair and splinters in his tail when he slammed it against a chair leg, tearing it off and all. Lahabrea never found out who did it, of course, but he always had had his suspicions.

Unukalhai meanwhile radiated an intent that was incredibly malevolent. Unsurprising, given the child’s status as survivor of a world that had been doused by infernal darkness; it was a barely-kept secret that the survivors from the Thirteenth all desired revenge. Yes, letting the boy know how to properly tear holes into reality was something that could possibly cause problems for him and the other Unsundered down the line. No, he didn’t particularly care. It made the playing field more interesting—and besides, he knew about this. It was hardly a trump card, a secret little weapon that no one knew about.

It was an equivalent exchange.

Besides, he deserved to know just as much as that boy did. Having been there ever since the Elidibus replacement act, as Lahabrea had started calling it, was not supposed to mean that the boy was allowed to know more than the other Unsundered.

Meteor had returned with little fanfare and the very distinct air of mischief about them. That Warrior of Light was more and more turning into an admittedly cheap but fairly accurate copy of Alexis right before his eyes, right down to a cheeky and cocky grin on their face as they put a finger on their lips and winked at the group when Ryne tried to chastise them for their sudden disappearance. Lahabrea had even cited a headache before vanishing and he had noticed the almost openly amused expression on Hythlodaeus’ face when Meteor waved their hand and said that they needed to check in with Count Fortemps.

Thus he had struck a deal with Elidibus’ little devil of a Warrior of Light, and heavens, the boy was insistent. Well, it was not his problem right now and it would not be much of a problem otherwise unless the kid went and conquered the Void with the ability to open hollows. Considering that he had to be raised to an Ascended status to even make the journey to the Rift with how injured he had been, it seemed rather unlikely.

As he learned from the list Unukalhai had written him, it seemed as if they were in the middle of the nonsense regarding the so-called Warriors of Darkness. The Unsundered were told to stay away from that mess since the Warriors of Darkness had been sent to the Source by Elidibus. People with the Echo would recognise Ascians, and Meteor wanted to slowly ease the soon-to-be Scion called Krile another Scion had called to Eorzea to help look for the missing Antecedent into the fact that the Warriors of Light were far from simply Warriors of Light. 

He however got stuck on the missing Antecedent.

Her role in this story that Elidibus and Hydaelyn’s Chosen had lived through was almost a tragedy in too many parts.

It was a rather ugly story, if one asked his opinion. Granted, he had to give the summary the following: he was biased. But so were any and all Warriors of Light that gave their opinion on this little ugly, tragic tale—after all, they served Hydaelyn just in the same vein that he served Zodiark. He needed another opinion on this. One that was preferably unbiased.

Or incapable of having a side bias.

Oh, he knew precisely who he had to ask.

* * *

If nothing else, the five that remained while the three that were not obviously Ascians or otherwise not quite right went to meet with the Echo-bearer Krile were content splitting.

Elidibus, much-recovered by now cited that he needed to deal with the Ascians who remained, seeing as by now Gaius van Baelsar should have reached the Burn in search of Fandaniel and Altima.

Unukalhai muttered something about needing a training session and vanished first, visibly shaking with either fear or excitement.

Emet-Selch looked around and noted with a sigh that Hythlodaeus had once again been a no-show.

And Lahabrea, lips pressed together in what clearly was his more thoughtful than unhinged state, wordlessly turned around and left through a rift.

* * *

In a city of scholars, as son of two of the most potent mages around and about, it turned out to be rather hard to learn martial arts. Physical self-defence was laughed at, and Emet-Selch had to admit that he used this status as just some random kid with immense magical gifts to form connections in search of someone who was willing to teach a wiry child with a stubborn streak devastating enough to lay Amaurot to waste if one let him.

Unfortunately for Hythlodaeus that simple fact meant that despite Emet-Selch not being particularly well-trained, he knew when to move to the side or in this case, duck. Admittedly, perhaps appearing out of thin air next to the one member of their little band who was used to solitary travelling was a bad idea, but he knew that if he gave Hythlodaeus the chance he would duck out of it. And he could not allow him just that.

A snort as he the once-elusive Fourteenth shook his head once he registered that he was not under attack.

“You.”

“Me. I do appreciate you not kicking my head squarely off my shoulders.”

Another snort. “I can serve if that is what you desire.”

“Maybe another day,” Emet-Selch said and waved his hand. “Hythlodaeus—”

Not much of the almost forlornly longing look in his eyes back in Ul’dah remained by now. Emet-Selch fell quiet once he saw the steely red glare that Hythlodaeus was shooting him—was this the contradictory nature of his Tempering in action? He would unfortunately have to ask Lahabrea about his theories on that eventually, because the fact it was hard to tell where on the side of light and dark their surprisingly quiet eighth member fell.

“Pray, there is no need to murder me with your eyes alone.”

“You just requested that I do not do so with my bare hands. Or feet. Unfortunately that means I can only truly stare at you until you either leave or drop dead—the choice to solve this conundrum is yours, Architect.” 

He pinched the bridge of his nose. This seemed to be the only conversation they had recently—Hythlodaeus rather skilfully dodged his supposed allies and went about his business with an almost astoundingly unbothered ease. He played his role of Seer as they had explained it to the Scions to perfection; a perpetual loner who, while devoted to his duties, preferred to do everything on his own while also making certain no one knew where his allegiances truly lay. The boy Alphinaud had asked about that once, to which Elidibus had answered rather flatly after a moment to think.

Thus the Scions believed that Seer’s trust had been broken countless times, leading to him keeping everyone just far enough away that what little remained of his heart would not break further once the inevitable betrayal happened.

Hythlodaeus in turn had seethed in silence as he was wont to do when he caught wind of that.

“Look,” he began anew, even taking a step backwards to show that he was not here to have yet another verbal match of some sort. “I merely came here to ask your opinion, and will leave as soon as you tell me to either go to hell or offer your thoughts on the matter.”

“Mhm-hmm.”

He tossed over the note. At the very least one thing never changed and that was that Hythlodaeus when on edge had a reaction speed that belied belief. Emet-Selch had underlined the important part, and Hythlodaeus took a moment to read over the little notes he added. Then when he was done he tossed the note back.

For a moment it was quiet—then Hythlodaeus let out a long, weary sigh.

“If it is an unbiased source for formulating an opinion on this that you seek, know that you will find no such thing here. It is undeniably an ugly, tragic story. But even my station does not lessen the fact that I hold, ngh, little love for the reason behind the Antecedent’s predicament.”

He crossed his arms. “… Hyth, please do not tell me that you cannot even voice your rather strong opinion on….”

And suddenly, his steely glare dropped as he snorted and let his shoulders slump. Emet-Selch noticed that he seemed to be fighting back a cough for a moment, then the Seer shook his hanging head. “Not without repercussion, no. But that is not why you are here, Hades. You asked my opinion—may I know why, at the very least?”

From the moment he had marched out of his unhappy childhood home, it seemed as if Hythlodaeus had transformed into a wholly different person. He lost the gloomy defiance, started laughing in earnest and developed quite a hand for horrible mischief. Emet-Selch had to admit that this sort of plot had always been more of the other’s idea, right down to the very nonsense that had seen them finally admit that perhaps they felt more than simple friendship for one another.

Hells, now that he thought about it the plan was rather similar. The goal was not the same, but the premise at least ought to make Hythlodaeus laugh, assuming he still could and would assist him even through the danger it posed for him.

“Oh, you know,” he said with a grin on his face that clearly made the Seer pause, “as the Warrior of Light stated when they returned, the timeline appears to be rather off the rails already. A greater derailment cannot hurt—and I fancy a spot of mischief directed at the Mothercrystal.”

“…!”

“I intend to weave that tragedy anew. Perhaps with a tragic outset, yes, but a less horrendously self-sacrificial outcome. I had the pleasure of getting to know the Antecedent. A woman you would scarcely believe was Sundered until her failings become apparent. But,” he offered Hythlodaeus a hand, “I cannot quite do it on my own. And unfortunately, everyone else is much too stiff when it comes to adhering to a timeline I had no idea even existed until recently. Your Echo should not have adjusted quite yet—how about we set that adjustment back a little like the old days, if only this once?”

Hythlodaeus stared at his hand for a while. Whatever was going through his head was always hard to read to begin with, but right now it was impossible. Not that Emet-Selch was trying.

Then, with his voice surprisingly shaky, Hythlodaeus shook his head. _“If you are trying to flirt with me, Architect, those days are way beyond us.”_

Emet-Selch snorted. Despite the shake, Amaurotine sounded so unusually smooth coming from the Seer—then again, Hythlodaeus had a voice smooth enough that he could likely sell someone their own grandmother if he so desired. It was what had made him popular along with his shockingly dry humour and unceasingly good mood once he was out of his childhood home. _“I am not. Those days are way beyond us—but even so, would you decline a chance to cause problems on purpose, especially aimed at one of your parents?”_

“… _You know how to sweet-talk an Amaurotine, Architect, you truly do. Of course I would not,”_ Hythlodaeus hissed and grabbed his hand.

* * *

The Warrior of Light, the Exarch and the Oracle of Light should by this point be somewhere close to finding Lahabrea’s former vessel and meeting the self-styled Warriors of Darkness. 

The easiest access to the Lifestream in this particular corner of the world had been placed under lock and key—the Antitower, the Sharlayans had called it. In the past that particular stretch of land had been where mages went on pilgrimages to learn their arts, it had been a battleground and a sacred place, an energy source, and plain a home to others. Of course, it being under lock and key meant that there was no way to get in undetected, and the last thing they needed was an angry crone’s little tools after them at every twist and turn. 

Frankly, while his sight would have eventually shown him a way in, he needed Hythlodaeus for a very simple reason: his sight was even keener, capable of catching even the slightest fluctuation, and not easily distracted by brighter colours. The Lifestream had once been nowhere near as bright as it was now, even partially raced across the skies in other parts of the world. The Floating City of Babil had been built upon an Underworld vein that broke out of the ground and travelled across the skies; the Lunarians born there all amongst the most skilled aethersensers in the world. It had not saved them from their city falling and crashing into the coarse ground below their floating empire when the Sound throttled the very vein of the Underworld they depended on. 

The Elementals that flitted about and the sheer brightness of the Lifestream would have distracted him. 

Hythlodaeus merely absent-mindedly offered his open palm to an Elemental—Emet-Selch watched how the aether-creature nuzzled against his hand with an almost amused squeak and then wound its way between his fingers over and over. 

Messing with Elementals was seen as childish thing in Amaurot, but even before he ever became the Chief of the Bureau of the Architect, Hythlodaeus had shown an almost unsettling genius when it came to dealing with creations that either gained or were created with enough sentience to seek play. He would have made a fantastic instructor for children had he not used said genius to reinvent the matrix register at the Bureau and Anamnesis. A little childlike energy could go a long way, he had joked and then shooed the gaggle of children oohing and aahing at his little helpers along. 

“… The unclosed hollow in the Tam-Tara Deepcroft has been disturbed recently,” Hythlodaeus said eventually. “There is a vast amount of aether pooling below the Shroud in the ancient halls built by the Duskwight. Most of it is voidal in nature emanating from the unclosed hollow, but there is a distinct tear in it that bleeds Lifestream into that aetherial lake.”

He would have missed that, but now that Hythlodaeus was pointing at it with his free hand, it was obvious for him to see. A small spark that seemingly did not belong into the aetherial pool that would all but drown the Shroud were it not for the Seedseers’ wards. 

A chirp from the Elemental. 

“The hollow ought to mask our entry. If we are swift about it, we can enter, grab the Word of the Mother and leave through it. Of course, assuming that you are the one doing the grabbing and I am the one keeping an eye on our exit, I should be able to close the tear lest more voidal energy seeps into the Lifestream. Which of course would be strengthen the Mothercrystal.”

“Enough to avoid a chain reaction on your side?” It was a serious question, and Emet-Selch watched Hythlodaeus close the hand the Elemental had disengaged from by now to carry on with whatever it was that the Elementals did in this forest. “I presume not.”

“Precisely so. But given what happens later, every little bit of strength Hydaelyn recovers counts.”

“… The ending has not changed, has it?”

“No, it has not.” He sounded unusually cheerful about it. “This is presumably the last chance we have to change our minds about this, Emet-Selch. Is further messing with this timeline truly what you desire?”

It was a truly bizarre role reversal. Normally it would have been him asking that question to a positively vibrating with chaotic energies Hythlodaeus rather than an unusually cheerful-sounding but otherwise completely blank-looking Hythlodaeus asking him. He was hit with a wave of nausea when the thought crossed his mind, but heavens he felt naught but rage towards both Zodiark and Hydaelyn for a moment. 

“It is not as if we are killing her. She will still remain the Word of the Mother no matter what—her role likely can stay the same throughout this story. But you know me, Gerun—I rarely back away from my plans.”

A raised eyebrow, but whatever was going through his head he left unspoken as he opened another rift to send them straight to where the tear was. 

* * *

Once upon a time, it had been both colours under shining sunlight and the stars blazing in the clear night skies. Most people with Sight only saw an undefined sparkle of either bright light or deepest darkness, but the better the sight became the clearer the fine colours threading through the Underworld became. Red lines, blue sparks, the most ridiculous combination of violent purple and garish green entwined to perfection as myriad colours sparkled and shone in that vast, untouchable stream of aether. Around the coast it took to a blue tint because of a large influx of water-aspected aether, a constant slightly blue fog that wavered about Amaurot at the coast with stray colours woven into it. Near Babil it turned greener and greener, to the point there were entire tendrils that shot off at night and blazed green across the night skies. Bodhum and Alexandria enjoyed a dance of fire and earth, red and brown, dully boiling much as the magma below their feet, burning and bristling like the fires in every Flareseeker and Steelheart. Amidst the whorl, between dawn and dusk, day and night, nothing resided over the Underworld. There were beliefs, of course, but none of them were ever confirmed or denied. 

Most Primals were based on such beliefs that had survived the Sundering or that Lahabrea meticulously revived to see them rise through prayer and worship. Some merely believed that the avatars of fate, one for every element, were swept along and there were mortals that guarded entrances to the Underworld. 

If one spent too much time with the Underworld, they would lose their sense of self and slowly but steadily dissolve to become part of it. No soul was ever reborn the same hue, thus making it a cycle of constant renewal. A renewal that came to a grinding halt for a reason no one ever found. Playful splashes of colours soon turned to grisly static as the very aether of existence unravelled and lashed out against the living. Looking at it for too long blinded those with finer sight, to the point that many a person who survived Termination took to wearing a band of cloth over their blinded eyes. A band of cloth that carried the colours of aether as they belonged, vibrant and bright and all too obviously lively. For the Underworld may have been their realm of the dead, their flow of aether without end, but it was also the source of all things living. 

Zodiark had darkened the Underworld. The strips of light that often dominated entire parts of it were much diminished, the Underworld flowed slower. The road to recovery was just that. Slow. Steady. Less vibrantly springing back and forth and breathing life into as much as returned to it. Darkness was the element of change, after all. Colours returned to their once bright colouration as time passed, right before his very eyes. The sacrifice had been worth it, would be worth it once each and every single soul was retuned to them to beholden their recovered star. 

Hydaelyn had all but stripped the darkness away. Rather than wash the colours clear and see them change, it was the same colours sparkling, not quite diffusing into the light mush around them. The same souls, stripped of their memories and returned to another life that would see them retreading similar paths over and over and over again, endlessly, as if it was any better than what Zodiark had managed. He knew he was a biased source. He did not care the slightest as he eyes failed to pick up more than the strongest splashes of colours that roiled against Hydaelyn’s infernally bright light. 

Somewhere within that light She should be starting to feel the intrusion. The Lifestream was the sole thing She aggressively defended—but the weaker She grew, the easier it became for him to siphon the energy he needed out of it. 

Sorcerers were taught in the art of borrowing as much as was needed, and returning it the moment the fight was over, usually together with whatever aether their defeated opponents left on the battlefield. Every so often a fight between sorcerers would end with the victor standing amidst their battlefield turning and twisting their staff to gather and disperse the aether. Emet-Selch had spent an age and a half without summoning his; that crystalline staff that he had shaped every time something major happened in his life. By the Sundering, a carving in the likeness of Zodiark sat atop it, and he felt the almost disgusted pulse in the aether around him when he whispered the words that called his staff to his side. 

“Seer,” he breathed into the bright light that left him unable to see very far, “I need your eyes.”

“That which you seek is vibrant, lively light encased in crystalline light to your left,” Hythlodaeus replied in a whisper, “finely woven enough that even your eyes ought to pick it up, Architect.”

The Oracle’s soul. A patchwork of the rough soul of a Shard and a fine, elegantly woven soul from the Source. Someone had undone the weave of the Source soul and stitched it onto the Shard soul, something so strange that even now he could swear he saw it before his eyes. And surely enough, as he turned his blinded eyes to the left, he caught something within the pulsing bright mess of the Lifestream that still carried the vibrant glow of life. Finely woven. With crystalline light hooked into it, encasing it, stilling it to mask its presence. 

It looked like an Unsundered possessing a yet-living person. He could swear he saw a dull soul of a pointless mortal throttled by the flickering, blisteringly dark soul of Lahabrea. That was how he knew that it was the Speaker approaching the soon-to-be Emperor Solus and not some random mortal with yet another pointless demand. 

He moved his arm with his staff the same moment an ear-shattering screech rang through the Lifestream as Hydaelyn noticed the intruders. Sorcerers called upon aether, and he focused his pull on that soul under Her control. Distantly, Emet-Selch heard a choke close to him, a quiet bid to hurry it up. 

Much like the boy with his aetherial little lassos, Emet-Selch made certain he had his grasp on that soul that clearly belonged to the Antecedent still despite Hydaelyn’s grasp on her. He yanked her up to him, gave the Word of the Mother not even a moment to say a word. 

“The exit, Seer!”

“Be… hind you. To the right. R-Rise… sorcerer,” came the near immediate reply, a voice he knew better than anyone else’s betraying an anguished state.

“… Will you—”

He felt the way Hythlodaeus slung his arms around him from behind. “Barely so, my strength should hold. I will close the tear. J-Just… get us out.” 

Emet-Selch rose—with the Mothercrystal’s scream echoing both from behind and from his prize’s mouths. 

* * *

Shadowless, he called her. 

He earned an immediate fleshless fist that glimmered and shone from the Lifestream still squarely in his face. The Word of the Mother’s rage was impotent at best, her mouth opened in a soundless scream. Not a sound escaped her as she threw her tantrum, her once Amaurotine sea blue eyes now barely more than an unearthly crystalline mirror of the same blue that controlled the shattered worlds. Minfilia did not speak, the Word of the Mother did not speak, and he watched pearly light aether drip off her and him. 

Eventually her soundless, voiceless rant became a whisper that very clearly was the Antecedent’s voice speaking the words of the Mothercrystal. Her eyes betrayed not a single change. 

The change, the awareness that returned to the Antecedent was betrayed by her furious rant about him being the scourge of evil and that none should have the audacity to fight the new world order like this should have remained dying in her throat. 

A horrid retching behind him reminded him of his companion. Hythlodaeus had, though magically not skilled at all, let go of him the moment they left the Lifestream into that voidal sea below the Black Shroud. He had fallen backwards and slowly, agonisingly slowly, pressed the seam shut and then used what little control he had for a few heartbeats to sew it shut entirely. 

He whirled around just in time to see his companion’s eyes fall shut with blood running out of the sockets and his mouth. 

“G-Give me… a… moment,” Hythlodaeus squeezed out before he slammed his hands over his mouth and collapsed to his knees.

He knew the nature of his Tempering now, and he saw what happened now. Light and dark cancelled one another out whilst he remained neutral, but right now it looked as if the light of his soul was tearing him apart from the inside. The way the Oracle of Light had described it, a Sin Eater transformation had started with light all but pouring out of every wound the person had, then gone on with violent coughing. The last, and perhaps most horrifying stage was when that light all but burst forth and leaked through eyes and nose and mouth, the ears. 

There was no light here. 

Hythlodaeus bled. 

There was no transformation, but he could not tear his eyes away as he fought back against that light. Eventually, after an eternity and a half, the Seer collapsed with a shuddering breath. 

Beside him, the Word of the Mother had her fleshless hands clasped over her mouth. Her blank eyes were wide with horror as the collapsed Elezen body started jerking and sat back up with a groan. Shadowless, all three of them were. Technically. Hythlodaeus had to keep up the illusion of being alive, but he near immediately slammed his hands over his mouth again with a truly wretched sound. 

“Good grief,” the woman he was not quite sure was the Antecedent or the Word of the Mother squeezed out eventually, her voice shaking and sounding more and more like it belonged to a mortal than some sort of apparition under Hydaelyn’s control. “What is… what is happening?”

“That, Antecedent, would be your Mother’s rage. I know you are just as furious, and likely even more confused as to why your Echo, your entire soul potentially, is telling you to destroy the dark servant near you, but if you would not mind keeping a truce for a moment? I know a place where we can talk, and we certainly need to get my… my partner here somewhere where he can safely disengage from his body without potentially an adventurer finding his abandoned body.”

The Crystal Tower. He would have to take her to the Crystal Tower, and if her presence did not alert the Crystal Exarch then Hythlodaeus’ bleeding borrowed body would. 

But even though her eyes remained crystalline blue and empty mirrors without pupils, glowing unsettlingly enough that it chilled him to the base skein of his soul, he saw that Hydaelyn’s grasp on her was fading now that she was out of the Lifestream. That was the Antecedent rather than the Word of the Mother. 

And the Antecedent, no matter how confused, was someone capable of speaking even with her worst enemies on equal footing. 

She nodded, and he moved forwards to pick up the still violently convulsing Hythlodaeus. 

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Hythlodaeus merely shook his head—and with that, he opened a portal and told the Antecedent to follow him. 


	52. INTERLUDE IX: Tragedies in Small Parts

“Ah, e-excuse me!”

Four people turned around to face the child, who in turn seemed to shrink away. Little ones that young unsupervised in this part of Amaurot? Still, staring up to adults they did not know was terrifying enough, but seeing one bore a red mask must have been even worse. He would have known.

Still he gave the little one a reassuring smile and nodded at them. “Yes, little one?”

“I-I! I’ve been… asked to find a, uh… someone n-named….” Desperately, the little one reached into a pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. Deep breath. “R-Right. Terribly sorry to bother an esteemed member of the Convocation, but the L-Lady, err…. High Lady Stargazer Adhara….”

By this point, the newly named Chief of the Bureau of the Architect and the other two people he had promoted before he handed his post to the woman beside him were exchanging worried glances. Hythlodaeus meanwhile patiently waited for the kid to stop stuttering about. He knew that even if he reassured that little one, they would start stuttering even worse. And showing any annoyance that was not there would just silence them forever.

Thus, he waited. They could not even have reached that part in their studies, judging from their height and their high voice.

“The Stargazer Adhara! Sent by the Children of Sirius! She asked me to ask someone if they know an Amaurotine! Named! Err! Named… named!” Another deep breath. “Loki.”

Hythlodaeus raised an eyebrow and stood back up to exchange looks with the people from the Bureau. A vague shrug told him the new Chief had no idea, and her associates also shook their heads. He hadn’t heard that name before.

“Sorry to say, little one, but none of us know an Amaurotine of that name.”

“D-Darn.”

He said nothing; he was not going to terrify that little one any further—but unfortunately for him, the Chief was a friend of his and one of the few people who had the uncanny ability to sometimes tell what was going through his head. She crossed her arms and snorted.

“If I may be so prudent—how about you join that search, Seer Gerun? Our business is concluded, lest you worry, little one.”

A shocked squeak before the little one shook their head furiously enough that their hood went flying off. “N-No! I-I mean, that is! Not necessary. I-I can manage on my own. A-And I don’t w-want to impose—”

“You would most certainly not be a detriment to my time,” he said quietly. “And if four eyes see better than two, then two mouths can ask around faster, don’t you think?”

* * *

The little one, he soon learned, was called Concordia and her father was directly involved with the ongoing talks between Archades and Amaurot. It was not very often that the Children of Sirius, least of all their leader the Stargazer Adhara and her entourage of High Ladies left their city. Only if the stars aligned did they leave, and apparently this time they had aligned in the favour of Amaurot and these talks.

He had already had the pleasure of talking to that woman the other day when she had specifically requested an audience with the Seer. She, too, had apparently a minor form of clairvoyance, leaving her a pleasant conversational partner due to her understanding that he considered it more of a curse than anything else. She had also not been all too happy about it, especially since her people read the stars to predict the future. It was more or less accurate, she had said with a laugh, but waiting for the stars to align was like pulling teeth at times.

“And you are certain it was the Stargazer who asked you to find an Amaurotine named ‘Loki’? Did she give you any other pointers?”

“Not really,” Concordia said, readjusting her hood once more and confidently stomping on ahead. “From the name I would assume them a Lunarian, but…!”

“A Lunarian?”

“Yes! Like Miss Venat. With long ears, and tall!”

He had to fight back a bitter laugh. He did, however, still settle on a jab in the end. “There are surprisingly few Amaurot-born Lunarians, and Venat of Anamnesis Anyder truly does stand above her fellows. Too bad about her personal life. But that is beside the point. You assume that the leader of the Children of Sirius sent you to look for a Lunarian?”

“Well! She said that she was not looking for one like herself, so certainly not a Child of Sirius!”

The kid lashed her stumpy tail about wildly, and he saw her ears also excitedly wiggle about.

“But she’s a Child of Sirius! They’re all led by women, it's gotta be a woman she's looking for, and I can’t think of women more impressive than the Lunarians!”

He laughed, loudly. As a child her age, he had almost lamented the fact that the only hint of Lunarian heritage he had was the fact that he was abnormally tall. Nowadays he was rather happy that he merely looked like one of hundreds of thousand other part-Atlanteans here in Amaurot.

“Sound logic, little one, sound logic. Although, the name strikes me more of something a Steelheart or a Flareseeker would be given. How about you continue looking for an Amaurotine with long ears, then, little one—and I look for one of our fellows with scales?”

“Yes, Mister Seer!”

* * *

They did not find ‘Loki’ in the end. The Stargazer apologised profusely to both him and the child because the one she needed approached her on his own accord not long thereafter, but Concordia took it in stride and said that she learned a lot and could now boast having spent time with a member of the Convocation to her friends. And he, as flippant as ever, said that he could now brag about having learned some of the best shortcuts through Amaurot thanks to her. The girl beamed, and the Stargazer giggled as well.

Of course he had known all these shortcuts. But children were to be encouraged when that young—and heavens, he knew what it was like to have someone as important and impressive as a member of the Convocation say that there was no need for all the childish cackling.

And who knew, perhaps the excited if easily flustered child would grow up to be the next person to be given a Convocation seat.

* * *

A sacrifice.

She volunteered as a sacrifice, and the part of him that did not already hate his father finally, finally started hating him too.

Heavens, he hated his mother even worse for trying to use the girl as leverage to gain his support for her cause.

Morality aligning be damned. Venat be damned.

He was not Gerun. He wished he weren’t Hythlodaeus either.

* * *

The Source at the very least was somewhat easy to chronicle. The Sundering was an event that faded with every passing generation—not that the Sundered truly knew what had happened. It was something that they soon came to call the events that brought the Twelve upon the earth and saw creation come into existence the way they had found it. But as time went on and on, those ruins faded into first the unknown territory and then into oblivion.

He decided to chronicle something else entirely instead, for he learned after the first time he begged a familiar soul to remember that it was very much against the nature of Hydaelyn to the point of punishing him with death.

The people.

The differences were almost jarring, especially whenever he recalled that one day he had spent chatting up every other Steelheart he came across.

Steelhearts and Flareseekers were soon called Au Ra; the white-scaled Steelhearts becoming the Raen and the black-scaled Flareseekers like Lahabrea were called the Xaela. Some bits and pieces were retained from their days as the people of Alexandria and Bodhum—the Xaela remained reclusive people that stayed amongst themselves even if they soon turned into countless splintered tribes that fought for dominance and the Raen while very proud and loud about it soon turned to turning everyone else down. Lahabrea had often joked about Flareseekers being the most stubborn yet dedicated people alive, and shades of that were still with the Raen and the Xaela both.

The Children of Sirius perhaps had one of the most glaring sudden changes. Split into the Seekers of the Sun and the Keepers of the Moon, the Miqo’te as they were called now all but forgot about tracing their decisions via the stars and their light. Instead they looked, as their names suggested, to the sun and the moon respectively and even adopted diurnal and nocturnal lifestyles to support that. The Sundering had seemingly split the Children of Sirius into two distinct people who very softly and very loudly, proudly followed their own ways. It was almost endearing if he did not remember the Stargazer so vividly.

The Lunarians, once the people who hailed from the Floating Continent, became the Viera instead. They turned from vibrant and talkative people to something more akin to inhabitants of Spirit Forests, and while nowhere near as childish or playful they very much made clear where they had staked their claim.

Atlanteans, meanwhile, were called Elezen now. He felt more at ease amongst these people, seeing as his own parents were half-Atlantean and half-Lunarian respectively—at least until it became clear that something or someone, and he was not going to point a finger at the so-called Mothercrystal, had majorly screwed up with how these people perceived themselves. Atlanteans like Mitron were surprisingly resilient yet extremely fast to whine once the temperatures dropped to a certain temperature. They were, after all, used to the climates at the southern coasts—somehow the Wildwood decided to live in the mountains mostly where strong winters beset them and took them swiftly and brutally whenever they were not prepared for it, and the Duskwights decided to instead live underground in fear of the Elementals.

Apparitions, of all things Apparitions, controlled most of the forests now. Many of the Fae were swiftly driven out and left to die before they could ever negotiate with the Apparitions—the few survivors such as the Sylphs all claimed parts of the forests that were too deep and too dark to truly nourish life. It was _bizarre,_ to say the least.

Amaurotines soon were merely called Hyuran people, Saronian Marchers were called the Lalafell, and he could not help but shake his head. Gone. Everything that he knew was gone.

And worst perhaps of all was the fact that he knew someone, somewhere, decided to teach the Sundered that marrying outside of their supposed race was a taboo that was not to be broken.

Hells, he was not even entirely sure that Lahabrea, Elidibus and Emet-Selch were to blame for that. Out of the four Unsundered, three of them were very content with with the mixed blood that mortals soon decried as affront against the Twelve. Lahabrea in particular would have been crushed by such a thing—many of the older ones had often joked about the Speaker once having been a bright-eyed idealist who would have given an arm, a leg, both his horns and his tail to see Bodhum and Alexandria at least somewhat more receptive to outside contact. Hells, he had even succeeded. He had mellowed down a lot as he aged, and by the time Hythlodaeus had been born the idealist had become more of a realist—not for want of passion, but because he had gotten to know the world much better.

He dragged a hand down his face.

Thinking about this for too long was giving him a migraine.

And he wasn’t even sure if he could blame Hydaelyn or Zodiark for it—or just this crushing sense of homesickness and not belonging that metaphorically beat him over the head.


	53. ACT VII: Beyond History's Weave, Part 4

For the first time in ages, he found himself quietly praying that he had imagined this the day before.

His sight was nowhere near as good as that of the Architect and the Seer, but even he could tell souls apart on occasion. At the very least souls that he had once been close to. In the Brume he swore he saw a familiar glint like sunlight reflected off the endless waves, a glint of steel moments before the blade fell. Glinting souls were an eyecatcher of sorts, something that very often drew attention both wanted and unwanted. Many creatures hunted with aethersight, and glinting souls like that were easy enough to see even from malms away.

It was already rare enough to run into a familiar soul on the Source.

Running into a shred of a soul of someone who made the same oaths as him but fell to the Sundering seemed an impossibility. Of course there had been times when they had raised Source-shards. Even through Ascension, eventually mortals found ways to bind the boundless and shattered them into bits of aether without sense. And bits of aether without sense irreversibly sought the Lifestream—the Lifestream where the harrowing guardian ghoul of a Mothercrystal pieced those shards back together so they could continue their endless cycle of rebirth.

The Mitron fallen on the First had been a shard from another splinter. He did not recall which, the Seventh, the Fifth, the Tenth, perhaps the First itself?

One thing was certain, it was not the Source. And gripped by desperation, he prayed that it was indeed not Mitron he had seen but a glinting soul like so many others.

The Source, being what it was, was the closest to how things had been. The details were muddled and stretched at times often thanks to the bizarre rule to stick with partners of your own Spoken race, but the souls here were reborn as close to their original self as possible. There were wild outliers, of course—usually those that had not chosen a side in the Zodiark-Hydaelyn conflict such as the Warrior of Light. But Mitron on the Source would have to have been born an Elezen due to the fact that they had been an Atlantean in the past. Going by the bizarre reincarnation rules on the Source and given the Duskwight scarcity, if Mitron were born in Eorzea they would have certainly been born in Ishgard.

The Brume residents out in this biting cold all watched him pass by. The mask already gave him away as Warrior of Light, even if they did not know how they looked. It was almost laughable that once upon a time the red mask had marked him a member of the Convocation of Fourteen or Thirteen, and now it marked him as one of many Warriors of Light who bore a mask. He retained a healthy amount of doubt about any of these claims that Elidibus made. Even if he knew to not doubt a Seer’s words, least of all one who, in theory, is enthralled in parts to the same deity— 

A glint.

He turned, and for the first time in an eternity, felt his heart _sink_ rather than roar in triumph at a replacement shard. 

The glinting unmistakably belonged to Mitron, and even if he doubted his own eyes, there was no mistaking the way this one looked. A child with unruly hair that peeked out in vibrant turquoise from underneath a shabby hood that could have barely kept any warmth in. Cerulean eyes that seemed to crinkle a little as the kid laughed and tossed a snowball at its fellows. Unmistakably a child of the deep, even if the deep that Mitron’s family had once called a home had never been their home. Their heart belonged to Amaurot, the city they had been born in, and they desired naught else but to follow the impressive career the first Mitron made for himself in the way they knew would be a boon to the star. A commoner, born with looks that befit nobility. Clearly a bastard-born Elezen much like the Mongrel was. 

It was said Mongrel that approached him with a questioning look on her face as he shook his head and turned away from the children.

“Everything alright, Warrior of Light?”

“Yes, quite.” A white-toned lie that satisfied the Sundered. She doubted his claims, but she knew better than to bother people who seemed disinclined to speak—better than most of her Sundered fellows at the very least. Still, he needed to say something to keep her off his case, because the curiosity in her ruby-red eyes was almost glinting as blatantly as Mitron’s soul was somewhere behind him. “Merely taking in the sights of… peace.”

A sly grin. “You’re dense if you think the peace will reach us any time soon.”

The Warrior of Light who bested him once and apparently bested him twice in another version of these events had talked about it, pride mirrored on their face as they spoke. The fallen Firmament, currently naught more than a pathetic set of ruins under lock and key due to possible collapse, and the rebuilding of Ishgard as a whole. Perhaps not this generation, perhaps not even the next, but one day soon that future would have reached a point where even the poor at least did not have to live in half-collapsed streets.

“Perhaps I am,” he said dryly, and Hilda laughed.

“Speaker, was it? There are so many of you it is incredibly hard to keep track of who is and who isn’t in and around the city.”

“So I have been told, and I cannot offer you any apology, explanation, or compensation for such.”

“Pah! You’re quite the jokester, are you not?”

“Royal court jester, perhaps, dancing on the tables as the Twelve will me to do.” A colourful insult that Gerun had used the other day, pulling up Elidibus by the collar of his robes when the talk had been about duties and those who shirked them. Lahabrea had, admittedly, spaced out throughout most of that. “But yes. Speaker is… who I am.”

In Amaurot, it was a title that held sway. Power. Power he never sought but that certainly helped his case, being one of the very few half-Flareseekers on the entire star. Here in this sundered nightmare, it was but the title of an adventurer who… had goals. Goals that he never disclosed, but that doubtlessly had to be good. For who else but good people could save the world?

“I thought you to be more of a stick-in-the-mud healer-type, most of ‘em are,” Hilda eventually chimed up, a grin on her face. “Gotta say, colour me impressed that you aren’t. But I’m surprised you didn’t go with the rest of your Scion fellows.”

“Too many cooks spoil the broth, my dear gunslinger,” he said and sighed. “Deemed one of the cooks too many, alas, I was left behind to keep an eye on the city.”

“’Cause of Lady Iceheart soon coming here with a bunch of her higher heretics and bloody dragons of all things for discussion?”

“Nidhogg is dead,” Lahabrea said calmly, “and it would be wise of the children of those that perpetuated the cycle to forge their own peace on their own terms. Ser Aymeric is a fool, yes, but he is not stupid. A wide-eyed idealist who can and will see this through, especially since the Lady Iceheart, too, is a wide-eyed idealist with enough energy to see this through… may just be what Ishgard needed to begin with.”

Hilda raised an eyebrow. The kid with Mitron’s glinting soul ran past the two of them with their friends, their laughter echoing through the Brume as they descended into the further reaches of the place.

“Somehow, I cannot shake the feeling that you speak from experience. Would that be correct?”

Dull, distant memories of himself. Animatedly speaking to a group of people who stared at him with cold glares. Amaurot and Bodhum hand in hand whenever necessary, a bond he forged with blood and sweat and hundreds upon thousands of words he spoke in blind, feverish idealism. Until his throat was raw and he only signed further and further, speaking until naught remained but a bone-weary tiredness that no sleep in the world could wash away.

It earned him the title Speaker second to none when his predecessor fell victim to long and harrowing sickness.

“… You would be correct.”

“Came crashing down to earth after you took your idealism too far, I suppose? Most idealists like Ser Aymeric and Lady Iceheart do not develop enough biting snark to get back at me so coldly as you just did.”

“In a sense, I suppose. But even should they fall, they will at least fall gently as long as they forge the proper bonds in the end. Which I believe they will.”

“… Did you fall gently, then, Speaker?”

He said nothing and instead turned to leave. He knew that was answer enough and also told her that this was something she had no right prying into.

* * *

Lahabrea had stopped for too long.

It came in a deluge he could not run from—realistically he knew that he was asleep as pretending to be mortal required. Realistically he knew that there was no way the earth could split like this again and that this corruption had not spread like an all-devouring wave. At least it had not in Amaurot.

He was frozen to the spot, the howling agonised cacophony of voices he heard very clearly not the same sound that had all but torn all of their deepest, darkest fears out for all the world to see as it devoured them. No, those voices he knew belonged to those that gave their lives to see the others saved not once but twice, Sundered and bound into places too far apart for most of them to join together into such an agonising chorus. A clear cut ran through the creature that wrenched its way out of this deep tear in the very earth that ceaselessly poured forth unidentifiable but rancid, acidic liquid that rushed past him with a hiss. A clear cut that turned into smaller cuts at some part, as if someone had bludgeoned it as those cracks appeared. Corrupted, empty crystals that shone with unearthly violet light between the unceasing dark deluge that started steaming at some point.

Zodiark—and by extension Hydaelyn—had been his creation. His idea. A choir of voices screamed at him to stop, to continue, to do what he had to do and to cut loose, to feed them their ponce of flesh. That the planet needed to be saved, that there was no point in any of this, that he could tear another shard down right this instant if he but did what anyone would have done. Salvation was not beyond him.

Salvation was not beyond him.

Salvation was not—

His arms refused to work as he tried to drown the voices out by covering his arms. The rising sludge hissed louder and louder, the voices turned from agonised to furious, how dare he deny them, how dare he pretend that everything was alright, how dare he not use what he clearly could to drive a blade between Venat’s ribs before she could ever summon her goddess, how dare he how dare how—

He shot up.

The room was dark, as dark as that wall of liquid had been. A crystal embedded in a staff twinkled softly in the rising sunlight that fell through the curtains at that window, tinted just violet enough due to it being lightning-aspected that it stilled his normally boiling blood.

Part of him expected to either throw up before he reached the window, or for the skies to be set ablaze with falling stars, falling buildings, a whole bloody falling part of Amaurot as the floating island irreversibly crashed into the roiling seas. But there were no falling meteors as he pushed open that window and collapsed against the windowsill with a strangled sigh of both relief and a minuscule amount of disappointment. The air was cold and crisp instead of a horrendous mixture of heat, soot and ash, burning particles and the distinct smell of burning flesh.

A low wind went through the upper parts of Ishgard, a soft breeze that would have been comforting to most people. Lahabrea merely managed a wretched sob that half died in his throat.

* * *

The day had started horrendous, and derailed further the more heartbeats passed. Deciding that he did not care that he looked as if he had not caught a wink of sleep, he was near immediately hounded by a servant of House Fortemps that bade him rest a little more. Lahabrea was perfectly fine on his feet and he simply marched on after saying just as much. Nigh immediately he ran into Elidibus who had apparently returned together with his little Warrior of Light.

Then the remaining Scion, that Tataru woman insisted that he ought to get more rest as well to which he finally dryly replied that sleep did not help when it were nightmares causing his exhaustion—that, in turn, made Elidibus throw a very pointed look at him that said this was something that needed to be discussed when somewhere more private.

Then, not a moment later, the Scions all returned from their little mess together with his once-chosen vessel. The man looked as much of a wreck as Lahabrea himself felt, and whatever joyful reunion the Scions were having he wanted none of it and said that he had a migraine and needed to actually go lie down somewhere quiet. Perhaps not to sleep but to get some rest.

Unfortunately for him, the rest of the so-called Warriors of Light all followed suit, claiming that there was something that the Exarch needed to investigate.

Not even a moment of explanation once they all were out of sight, and the Warrior of Light merely all said that it concerned the Crystal Tower and something rather unsettling that the Exarch felt. He was not given much of a choice in that regard, and all of them departed in a cluster that curiously enough appeared to be missing the Architect and the Seer.

He had not even remotely left the portal before he heard a screech and was thrown into a wall. Crystal cracked under the impact, and at the same moment the very distinctly metallic smell of blood hit his nose.

Lahabrea blinked.

Not a moment later what felt like an intense burst of light aether smacked him squarely in the face, formless enough to not do any harm but aetheric enough to bore needles into the hole in his aethersight that Igeyorhm had torn into it.

“Your Twelve be damned, girl, cease this infantile tantrum at once!” Emet-Selch’s voice was weary, and Lahabrea saw a flash of brilliant white and what he assumed was a gold blonde that whirled about in front of him. “I told you we would explain this when inevitably your own partners and ours arrived and—“

“Perhaps you ought to have mentioned that one of the people we were expecting was _Lahabrea!”_ Now that voice, that was familiar. Perhaps not as familiar as it could have been, but it was a voice he had been told never to expect again. “It certainly does not do well for your cause!”

He shook his head and looked around.

Frankly, it was a ridiculous room to be in. The Warrior of Light, not too long ago almost aglow with mischief, looked as if someone had gutted their family in front of them. The Oracle of Light likewise looked perfectly shocked into silence, and beside them stood the Exarch with his red eyes wide but focused on something else entirely. Elidibus closed his eyes with a sigh and raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose while his little Warrior of Light remained almost uncharacteristically unbothered by the scene in front of them.

Emet-Selch was trying to calm down the Antecedent who clearly still lacked a physical body for the time being.

And behind them, the thing that the Exarch in particular was looking at, was Gerun sitting slumped against the wall with seemingly no tension left in his body, rolling the one eye he had open—the other one was squeezed shut. Not to mention the blood.

Seeing as he was the main offender here, apparently, Lahabrea let out a long sigh and folded his hands together. Delicately, almost, although he notes the distinct feeling of missing scales. Just as the nightmares caught up to him, it seemed the phantom pains of a body long lost were catching up to him as well. 

“Whatever it does for the Architect’s cause I cannot quite say, seeing as it would appear neither party here is entirely filled in on the details for full understanding, Antecedent.” Voice level. He was fully aware of the shocked look Elidibus in particular was giving him. “Assuming all parties can retain a certain level of calm for a period long enough to exchange details, perhaps an understanding can be reached. It is not required, of course.” He gave the shadowless being all but glittering with light a long, pointed look. “Heavens and hells that mortals decry, were you to ask my opinion on it, I would personally think an understanding between our stances a ridiculous notion. But given all that has happened… perhaps an understanding is impossible, but a truce of sorts is not. One need not hold love for the opponent to end a bloody war temporarily or for good, after all.” 

* * *

Understanding was what won him Bodhum’s trust in the end.

His mother had, as far as he remembered, always feared the very day that someone pointed out that a Flareseeker outside of the city was odd and reported his very existence to the city. The day had come, of course, it always came. But he was not an easily impressionable child to begin with—studious and ridiculously stubborn to a fault. The years softened the edge, but he knew where his heart belonged. It certainly did not belong with this man claiming to be his father, with these people saying that either be belonged with them or would remain an outcast. 

He chose to be an outcast—an outcast who eventually bridged the gap between the people, even if it was for something as idiotic as an alliance to see the spirit of flame inhabiting the volcano that separated Bodhum and Alexandria quelled with words rather than violence. For violence begot violence whenever the ancient deities were involved. 

Of all things to remember, this one pressed down into his already nightmare-heavy mind.

It would have been so very easy to kill each and every single mortal in here. An Unsundered could easily tear an Ascended apart and move on. The Exarch remained mortal to a fault, and while his mind may have lived on in the Crystal Tower itself should his flesh be slain, there was no way of telling how much a conscience stuck in an immovable tower could have done. The Oracle and her dreary patchwork of a soul, the little Warrior of Light that Elidibus had taken care of. Gerun would not be able to stop them. The Antecedent had been forced into a state of self-awareness to a point that she could exist outside of the Lifestream, but it was obvious that she would not exist long without a vessel to pour her essence into.

The Warrior of Light would present an issue, but he was nothing if not a stubborn Amaurotine Flareseeker.

The choir calling for blood to be spilled so that they may walk the earth again instead of these sundered, pointless existences could have its share of flesh right here.

Lahabrea drowned the voices out with his own. 

He had understood Bodhum’s position. Peace treaties from old wars bound them, a people fully capable of creating weapons that would destroy their opponents. They yearned for tests of strength, but a guardian deity from the ages of chaos was not the right opponent to face.

The Antecedent was not a Flareseeker. She was nowhere near as complex as any of the people he had once united, and all he faced was her seething hatred for Ascians. He had faced worse, staring down at them with too many bloody eyes in the literal sense, screeching horror and agony out into the burning skies. 

He talked. Feverishly, almost, with Elidibus’ gaze burrowing into his back that ached with the sudden awareness of how he shifted his weight to account for a tail that was no longer there.

When he finished, it was not with a bang. It was not even with a sigh. No elaborate sentence to cap it all off. He merely stopped, the sudden flare of energy spent and the usual dull edge to his awareness setting in once the distant chorus of voices rose once more.

Perhaps he should not have told this story from his perspective. All things considered, the Unsundered collectively looked somewhat spooked, as if a long dead man had walked past them perfectly unharmed. In a sense he had, for it had been the Speaker Lahabrea rather than the Ascian Lahabrea doing to talking for a while. The Sundered meanwhile all looked more or less confused at the base of it; from the boy whose expression was hard to read due to how distant it was to the Warrior of Light who had an eyebrow raised and who then leaned to the girl beside them to shrug when the girl asked something.

Hydaelyn’s little plaything, however, had a distinct lack of reaction. Her eyes betrayed nothing—they were perfectly still crystalline blue mirrors that made trying to read her thoughts extremely different. Her expression was blank and distant, her pose nowhere near relaxed but not tense enough to be a metaphorical Fae caught outside their usual frolicking spots. She looked around the room. 

Elidibus slightly moved his head when she looked past him. The Warrior and Oracle of Light both nodded reassuringly, as if trying to underline what Lahabrea had said. The boy reacted not, instead keeping as still as possible as if he hoped no one would notice him. The Exarch sighed vaguely and waved his crystalline hand through the air.

Emet-Selch had sat down next to the still rather lifeless-looking Seer.

The Antecedent and Lahabrea once again locked eyes, as if she were trying to force him to admit that he had been lying and that her half-life existence was forfeit. Nothing of the sort happened, and he watched her expression finally change as she closed her eyes.

“All of this… directly contradicts what I have been told,” she said calmly.

A loud, wheezing snort from behind. “History is ever written by the victor,” came the snarl from the Seer, and his entire body jerked in a spasm that seemed more than a little painful. Emet-Selch softly put a hand on his shoulder and said something as if it would stop this one particularly stubborn Amaurotine brat. “And scarcely have I had the displeasure of witnessing a victory nearly as absolute as that of Hydaelyn. To the victor go the spoils and a spin on history itself is always atop whatever spoils there are to claim. Of course you would get the victor’s tale. It is, much like any Ascian’s tale, more than a little biased.”

“….”

“Zodiark is far from the monster that went rampant that Hydaelyn makes Him out to be. Even I can admit that much now. On the other hand, Hydaelyn’s attempt at saving the world She perceived in danger at the time may have been rash and ill-informed but it is far from as malicious as the Ascians make it out to be. For what it is worth, I am certain that the Warrior of Light in particular can confirm that, for once, not a single lie left the Speaker’s mouth.”

Meteor nodded, and the Seer coughed vaguely.

“If you remain unconvinced still, then I am at wit’s end. And still in excruciating amounts of pain due to going against the Mothercrystal like that when I was one of the prizes She intended to claim at the Sundering.” A lopsided smile that shattered into a grimace as he winced. “Heaven’s sakes, I bled out seven times over and this harpy of a mother still will not let me rest.” He opened one of his eyes again and glared at the ceiling. “This is why I walked out without warning or farewell! You hear me, Hydaelyn? This exact—gah!”

He slowly slid down to the ground and writhed a little. At the very least it was a bloodless affair, but one the Antecedent watched with furrowed eyebrows.

Lahabrea rolled his eyes and then cleared his throat. “Emet-Selch. How much longer do you suppose she has before the Lifestream calls her back?”

“… Her physical form has either dissolved by this point or was claimed by Hydaelyn otherwise. If she is to remain, she must needs be put into a new vessel or otherwise contained within auracite—I am ill-inclined to hand her back to Hydaelyn after going through all this trouble to retrieve her.”

“Hold on,” Meteor shook their head, their expression unreadable. “Integrity. As much as it pains me, Minfilia is needed to stop the Flood of Light on the First as Word of the Mother. The self-proclaimed Warriors of Darkness are still desperately trying to induce your Ardor to save their falling home from complete annihilation.”

Elidibus cleared his throat. “If you could spare them, we could stall the Flood’s advance if the Antecedent would be willing to suffer the presence of a Warrior of Light and a Scion of Darkness by her side. After all, did not the Word of the Mother impart her powers wholly to the Oracle of Light?”

“Oh!”

“There of course remains the issue of the ‘Warriors of Darkness’, but… that is something that would solve itself because they would realise that slaughtering the Warriors of Light may plunge the Source into enough despair, would it not?”

Meteor narrowed their eyes at Elidibus, and Lahabrea would have given anything to understand what this level glare and Elidibus’ slight grin meant. Something or other related to their arrival here in this timeline, he supposed.

After an eternity in utter silence, the boy from the Void moved. He crossed his arms and shook his head slightly. “The issue remains of how to explain the Antecedent’s presence—or lack thereof. You have just met with, ah, Mistress Krile, was that her name? You but just returned from meeting with her to find the missing Scions, the Antecedent in particular. How are you going to deal with that?”

Meteor crossed their arms with a deep sigh. “Assuming Minfilia… pardon, the Antecedent is willing to play along with our ruse, it would be as simple as dispatching each and every single guardian within the Antitower and returning with her.”

Lahabrea had been in precisely the same situation as her not too long ago, he noticed. Surrounded by all these people with their frankly insane story; people he once considered allies suddenly hand-in-hand with the people who were technically his worst enemies. Lahabrea had been given the upper hand for a while because Gerun had given him a bit of information that the others lacked—the Antecedent if she was not as stupid as the other Sundered would soon realise that she could very easily set their house of cards on fire before toppling it over.

Given the way she narrowed her eyes, she likely arrived at that conclusion eventually.

“You have, thus far, never quite given me reason to doubt your sincerity, all of you. Were you truly trying to… trick us not allied with the Ascians, you would not… would not have bled for us as much as you did.” Her blank eyes focused on Lahabrea in particular, and he held her stare calmly. “On the other hand, what has been done cannot be forgiven. It would be an alliance that requires me to keep quiet about your… allegiances.” Minfilia turned to look at Gerun, who had stopped writhing by now. He met her gaze with a crooked, agonised grin. “I could just as easily reveal you all for what you are—schemers working with Ascians, or Ascians entirely. Why place that trust in me?”

Perhaps an understanding could be reached after all. Lahabrea crossed his arms and willed the voices to fall quiet for just a moment. They would get their share of blood and aether eventually. They always did.

“The enemy of your enemy is not a friend you have to forgive, Antecedent. But in some extreme situations they are allies that you will have to work with to avert further catastrophe.” 

A snort from Gerun. “Wordy old bastard, get to the point. Or let me. What he is trying to convey here, Antecedent, is the fact that we are all in the same sinking ship. You can either help us keep it afloat or sink it entirely—but know that should you choose that, you will sink with us. You need not forgive our misdeeds—doing so would be a disservice to both the myriad Sundered the Ascians slew directly or through inaction _and_ to the people who gave up their lives for the world before the Sundering. But spare us your rightful retribution for the time being until we settle this greater evil that would stop at nothing to get what it desires. Who knows? Maybe you will learn some very instrumental weaknesses of ours to end the Ascian scourge once and for all and we will be incapable of stopping you, Antecedent.” 

“Rude as always, but essentially that is what I would have tried to convey, yes.” 

It was quiet for a long, long time. 

Then after an eternity of silence, the Antecedent shook her head slightly just when Emet-Selch was helping Gerun stand up. 

“The moment I doubt your motives is the very moment I will tell the world what you are. Otherwise, there is little I can disagree with. The greater good… requires working with the lesser evil on occasion, and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn work towards the greater good.” She glared into his general direction. “Consider yourself under constant watch, however. The others I can work with—you I trust no further than I can see you.” 

“Understood,” was all he said to that when every single person turned to glare at him as if to pressure him into the right thing to say. 

Lahabrea could suffer a mortal breathing down his neck, he supposed. For the time being at least. 


	54. ACT VII: Beyond History's Weave, Part 5

“Frankly, at this point it may be easier to find a solution by throwing darts at a wallscroll with whatever nonsense you have so far come up with,” his unwanted partner snarled at him as they both paced the room in the Crystal Tower. 

“None of this would have happened had you _killed him.”_

“Ah yes, of course. In case you had forgotten, O Crystal Exarch, had I done so you would have sooner seen me impaled with Auracite than working with me. I am not wholly unconvinced that this is not your endgame still. Mind, your tower would have been compromised by your alternate self by now, causing more trouble than worth it—but by the very pinnacle of the heavens and the deepest pits of all hells, you would have sooner seen our fragile alliance shatter then and there had I killed him.” Elidibus was right, of course—and he knew it. With a triumphant and arrogant smirk he nailed the Exarch with a glare. “Of course simply killing him would have been easier. You have but yourself and your beloved hero to thank for this conundrum.” 

The Exarch drew his hands down his face with a desperate sigh. For the better part of the past few hours they had thrown every suggestion they had ever had regarding the double G’raha Tia issue this timeline was facing onto the metaphorical table and very precisely worked their way down.

Ryne had reported that one of his sisters had been in Garlemald as a conscript and talked about a letter from another sister who mentioned someone from the Students of Baldesion coming over to ask about where he could have gone. Meaning that any claims that he had simply returned home after the Calamity and gotten caught up in nonsense with one of his few brothers—not to mention male Miqo’te were rare to begin with. He would have mentioned a brother who was his age.

Lying to Krile was also an impossibility. Any notion he immediately threw off the table—the emotion-based Echoes were all troublesome even Elidibus had to admit through clenched teeth. She would simply know when someone was blatantly lying to her with ill intent, and anything regarding her lost friend would be considered ill intent by a sundered, less controllable Echo. 

Pretending to be related also meant that they could not exactly start claiming anything else; the Scions would grow suspicious after Emet-Selch’s little stunt with the egi. 

They continued pacing, both their ears drawn back as they thought, nearly ready to pounce on one another judging from the tension in Elidibus’ borrowed body.

Eventually they both stopped at the same time, likely circling the same thought. Had Emet-Selch not gone on to do exactly that, they could have instead pulled a silly stunt—which in turn would have made this entire mess so much easier.

“Alright,” he conceded once he noticed the Ascian was staring at the floor with furrowed brows, “perhaps we went about it from the wrong angle. Screaming at one another trying to pin the blame on the other party is very much not productive.” 

“Agreed.”

“Perhaps we are simply overlooking the much easier solution to any of this. Something that is plain ridiculous enough to work, plausible yet outlandish enough that it cannot be replicated easily.”

Elidibus narrowed his eyes. “Replicated…?”

“…?”

The Ascian crossed his arms and started pacing once more, his eyes barely more than slits at that point. “Entertain me for a moment here, Exarch. I am reminded of a tall tale a child in Amaurot tried to make me believe. How, according to said child, it had gotten copied somehow when younger. Meaning there was an identical twin running about who developed rather differently. Now, there were indeed Amaurotine phantomologists capable of replicating a body if necessary, but it would simply be a body. That which the Allagans called ‘Genesis expression’ was the ability to create matter out of nothing, or more simply put Creation that even the Sundered are capable of. Creation of course also includes living matter. Bodies. Living creatures. Not a soul, mind, but enough autonomy. It also presented a moral dilemma that quite a few phantomologists had to work their way through, but that is irrelevant. While the child with its tall tale was simply revealed to be a pair of twins who liked pulling this prank on people, perhaps if we adjust that story to suit precisely the tall tale too ridiculous to work yet perfectly plausible happenstance within a given frame of believability.” 

The Exarch also crossed his arms to roll that over in his head.

“Allag has… perfectly working cloning technologies available still. Clones of the royal prince and princess Doga and Unei were the ones who initially granted us access to the Syrcus Tower and ensured that I would be capable of fully controlling it.”

“Not to mention that the Garlean Emperor Varis has more than a vested interest in bioengineering. Had. Heavens and hells know whether that was inherent or merely a permutation of his intelligence based on how everything following the liberation of Ala Mhigo went.” Elidibus uncrossed his arms to dismissively wave a hand through the air. “Irrelevant, I know. But Garlemald in particular has been able to replicate Allagan cloning facilities.”

“I am well aware—in case you had forgotten, I hail from a future where precisely such happened, albeit not under his rule. After all, dead Emperors cannot order weapons of mass destruction to be used. Their heir apparent controlled by an Ascian, however… but I digress. It only leaves the matter of my own disappearance, of course, but that is surprisingly easily fixed.”

Elidibus rolled his eyes. “Stubborn children leaving at the first chance they get seems to be one of the few things to escape the Sundering unscathed. Whether they leave with malicious glee or in the very second the chaos permits them to slip through matters not. You strike me more as the latter, however.”

The Exarch raised an eyebrow. “You speak as if you know one of the former.” 

“As do you.” 

“Uh…?”

“The Seer. But in any case, would that be plausible enough to trick your friend long enough to find an answer as to what her Echo will doubtlessly tell her eventually?”

“… I believe so. More or less at the very least.”

* * *

They agreed that they could not let Krile tell the Scions that something was wrong. Thus, while they were idling away in Idyllshire waiting for her, the Exarch eventually asked Alphinaud and Y’shtola to come over because he had something to confess.

At the very least the others had said that it was time to admit that they had a rather large amount of secrets, perhaps best starting with the mystery of the Seeker twins Exarch and Emissary.

“I… have a confession to make,” he said, and Alphinaud near immediately started frowning. “I may not have been entirely forthcoming about Emissary and I.”

Much to his surprise, Y’shtola nodded. “I was starting to wonder ere the banquet drove us all apart. You do not exactly seem to have that underlying bond that all siblings share—it rather seemed as if it were developing right under our noses, and even then something felt decidedly… off. But why would you confess such now?”

He rubbed the back of his neck with a sigh.

“Before the Calamity, I was a Student of Baldesion.”

“A bad conscience, then?” The fact that her ears were straight up and turned towards him told him that she was more surprised about the Student of Baldesion confession than she let on.

“Something like that, perhaps. Or rather the fear that you would consider all of us malicious liars.”

It was Alphinaud who shook his head now with a low, displeased hum of sorts. “Your pasts are things you could entrust us with but that you chose not to share. We respect that, despite the fact that some are more than a little curious about it. You may be lying to protect yourselves first and foremost but there is still the chance you may be lying to protect us as well. And that, that we can appreciate—even though I cannot think of a single Scion who would not be willing to help you deal with whatever from the past may come to haunt you.”

Y’shtola nodded, a small smile on her face as she twitched an ear at him. “And Krile will be happy to see one of her fellows. Any anger I may hold for being lied to for so long completely vanishes in the wake of that. What befell her is a terrible tragedy, after all.”

He nodded mutely. “That it is indeed… err. She may blurt out my… birth name. Could I ask you to continue calling me Exarch?”

Alphinaud and Y’shtola exchanged a glance—then they both started laughing.

“That I cannot promise in good conscience,” the conjurer eventually said, tail swishing from side to side in amusement. “Perhaps I shall use it later on to tease you.”

“… I suppose I deserve as much.”

* * *

Even through the desperation of a forsaken future, the light of hope ever so feebly shone. And while the land was destroyed and the people were killing one another, many carried the tales they heard close to their hearts. The Ironworks in particular held the story of their founder aloft like a standard—not just the Warrior of Light themself but also the very people who often helped turn the tides with their unceasing dedication. Many of these stories ended in utter tragedies, like Wedge. Others led to stranger endings, or missed an ending entirely.

A story that did not end in Mor Dhona itself when the winds turned foul and murderous. Sources were unclear on how long it lasted, given that all flow of information had gone from written to exclusively tales exchanged between survivors passing one another in the fields assuming they did not turn to murder. The ending was where people started arguing. Some say she lived and travelled, ever forlornly searching for fellows to fight for her cause and sharing stories at hushed camps off the beaten paths where survivors flocked together for a scant few hours before marching on as if they had never met, taking naught but the stories shared along with them.

Whatever truly became of Krile Mayer Baldesion was a mystery.

Some stories said she travelled with a boy in white for a while. Others claimed that she made her way to Idyllshire only to vanish without a trace on her way to Matoya’s Cave. Some more pessimistic stories told of a fight that ended in more bloodshed than she ever wanted, whispering promises made between the Student of Baldesion and the missing leader of the Scion of the Seventh Dawn.

The story the Exarch, then merely called G’raha of the Crystal Tower, added to the mix was one not of the Eighth, but one of the Seventh. The moon had fallen, the halls had been abuzz with people flitting in and out and about. Desperate calls over linkshells to relatives and fellows on the Eorzean mainland, the cries and sobs of people who had confirmations and the bristling anxiety of those that lacked such, all mingling together into a cocktail that must have been truly virulent for someone whose Echo was emotion-based. Yet despite all that, she held her head high. Shaky, perhaps, but she sat beside him for hours on end as they offered hands to people who needed them in that moment. And then, once it grew quieter, they merely sat down together in silence and watched the now single moon rise.

She was not a hero like in many tales from the road. She was not someone who easily gave up or would go down quietly either.

Krile was Krile, and the Exarch had never once stopped considering her his best friend.

Not even a single glamour could have made her not recognise him then and there. Her face froze once she saw the Warriors of Light—Meteor, Ryne and him—and he realised that she too likely never stopped thinking of him as a friend. In that future he slept through and then averted, in the timeline that he sought to save and failed to, and now here in this timeline where the unknown waited for them.

“Raha!” she cried out in surprise.

“Krile,” he politely greeted her back with a raised hand, trying to keep level.

“Raha—G’raha Tia!” Unsurprisingly, her shock near immediately melted into anger. “Why, I should pull your bloody ears off your head! Do you have any idea how much grief you caused us with your sudden disappearance? We had thought you _dead!”_

He kept his mouth shut and averted his eyes a little. After all he was not the G’raha who had vanished; he was a completely different G’raha from a completely different time altogether. It hurt, thinking about it now. Between him, the sleeping one in the abandoned timeline and this one, all of them had the same starting points but nowhere near the same development. One had been plucked from his story early, one remained asleep to wake in a better future that would never come and who would likely perish in his sleep, and one… one was standing here now, a Warrior of Light of all things and awkwardly rubbed his Spoken arm with the crystalline one that was still in a gauntlet.

“I admit, I fled on the eve of the Calamity in a haste and would have returned, had I not run into… certain complications that led to me being here as an adventurer called Exarch rather than, say, a Student of Baldesion and scholar at the base of the Crystal Tower. I should have said something. By the time I thought that much, I had acquired… baggage, for a lack of better term. I could hardly return with something born of Allagan technology.”

“Yes, you could have, you silly boy,” Krile snapped. Her anger had slowly vanished a little and changed to heartbroken relief. “But perhaps it is a blessing in disguise since it saw us reunited here and now rather than leaving me to mourn another when the island vanished.”

“Wait.” Alphinaud crossed his arms with a frown. “Something born of Allagan technology? You don’t mean—”

“Did you know that Allag devised a technology that they called ‘cloning’? It near perfectly replicates living beings, from the smallest opo-opo to… certain Seeker of the Sun Miqo’te who stray too far into the facility and get their body’s composition scanned. The clone and the… clonee, for lack of better terms? They are not supposed to meet like this, I reckon, but I could hardly leave him in there. So I took him and fled the facility, made certain it collapsed that none could find anything in there intact. Some things are too terrible to let anyone find, even if their intentions are good.” He sighed. “By that point I realised that you would likely stage a search of sorts, and I panicked. G’raha Tia times two would cause mayhem in ways that I did not exactly want to spread, and thus we agreed to merely call each other Exarch and Emissary and pretend we are twins instead.”

For a moment, it was rather quiet.

Then Krile broke into loud laughter. He could tell she was still mad and would be for quite a while no matter how relieved she was, but seeing as her laughter spread to the rest of the group like that it at least meant that the plausible-yet-implausible story was working. Indeed, even Y’shtola had to chuckle slightly into a hand she raised, and Alphinaud was holding back joining into Krile’s laughter.

“Well, that certainly explains your familiarity with Allagan technology,” the Elezen said with a cackle of sorts, and the Exarch drew his ears back in embarrassment he was not even sure was faked any longer. “Or Emissary’s, for that matter.”

“Speaking of whom, I do not happen to see a second Raha out and about here,” Krile tilted her head to the side and scanned the area.

Meteor was the one who cleared their throat at that. “We split whatever work we have between the eight of us.” Their tone was professional to a fault, but the Exarch clearly saw the amused twinkle in their eyes. “Five of us are busy otherwise, and as unfortunate as that may be for your curiosity, Emissary happens to be one of the five otherwise engaged.”

Krile raised an eyebrow at that and then nodded. “I see, I see. That certainly explains the countless tales of all your collective exploits reaching even as far as Sharlayan at times—although it just so happens that most people overseas do believe you to be one person doing all the heavy lifting.” She almost approvingly looked over the three adventurers. “Thankfully it would seem that you understand basic battle composition. Is your healer one of the five otherwise engaged?” 

“That he is,” Meteor said. “You are rather observant to pick out whether or not there is a healer present. I believe that you and Speaker will get along just swimmingly, Mistress Krile.”

“Oh please, drop the mistress. I am but your comrade in arms in the search for the missing Scions, Warrior of Light. Consider my curiosity about your healer piqued—few can handle a group of four, but eight? Your Speaker must be quite the healer.”

“Quite the pain in the arse, more like,” the Exarch hissed with a sigh and shook his head. “Oh and… Krile?”

“Yes?”

“… It is good to see you again. I intend to tell the full story to all of you one day sooner or later, but for the time being… would you terribly mind calling me ‘Exarch’ in public?”

She crossed her arms at that and huffed. “I was going to, you silly fool. I am not so dumb as to not recognise code names when I hear them.”

At that, everyone present laughed once again.

* * *

According to Meteor’s hissed explanation, most of what happened after remained the same, but now began the point where they were starting to worry.

For as strange as the story was going by now with Eorzea at large, one thing seemingly remained the same due to Elidibus’ refusal to interfere until a certain point. The thing in question being, fortunately and unfortunately in equal measures, Ardbert and the others from the First. There were some hesitant attempts to fill out the story by the Ascian and Meteor both, seeing as the Exarch and Ryne both knew the tales as people of the First and as Scions. Meteor, having merged their soul with Ardbert’s due to both having had the same Unsundered soul as a starting point, knew things about Ardbert’s life and afterlife that others knew not. Elidibus on the other hand, seeing as he was the Emissary and a time traveller both, knew what transpired after his temporary ascension whenever the group did not encounter the Scions. 

With so many Scions about and Thancred about to join and the fact that Ardbert and his friends all possessed the Echo and would inevitably have an Echo flashback that was uncontrollable and might yield information about their status as time travellers to an antagonistic party, Meteor was starting to get nauseous. So much hinged upon their little house of cards that currently stood between the world at large and utter annihilation between the two forces that controlled it. He could not truly offer them more than a slight comforting brush against their arm—something that did not catch anyone’s attention in any case. 

The small sigh they let out told him that they at least appreciated the gesture, seeing as they were the one who would be leading the charge into Gnath territory. 

Having arrived after the Flood had been halted, he had only heard the few survivors who met the Warriors of Light. One he met while on his way to Eulmore as an ambassador for the new settlement at the Crystal Tower’s base to ensure that Eulmore and the soon-to-be-called-that Crystarium were on the same wavelength regarding the Sin Eaters and fighting back against them while also ensuring that there was no threat to Eulmore from this ragtag bunch of survivors settling near the tower on the main continent was a middle-aged farmer on the way to Eulmore. Shockingly enough, it was the very person who came across their corpses, led there by a highly distressed Amaro that other survivors confirmed as Ardbert’s Seto. 

It had taken him some haggling but the man agreed to part with the Amaro. 

The defeated warble of that bird still haunted him in the darkest of dark nights. While Meteor clearly left their own Chocobo out of the more pressing engagements, whatever minor jobs they accepted they very gleefully did with their own Chocobo. The bird adored them, and distant stories told of an entire flock of former adventurer-owned Chocobos was led by Meteor’s very own bird. Tales of that bird’s flock told of clearly feral birds that never once attacked Spoken… unless it were the Spoken attacking one another. Of course no bird lived that long on the Source, and that very Chocobo had passed more into myth than reality by that point. 

He considered telling the Amaro this very story—and he did, albeit in an altered state. After all, who knew what mages here were capable of, and myths of speaking Amaro were plenty enough. Somewhere in Lakeland, however, he let go of the reins. He very carefully took off the gear that Seto had been equipped with, and the bird had stared at him with its bleary eyes. 

He set Seto free. Whether the Amaro lived or not was none of his business, but seeing as the farmer had found Seto without gear—the gear had been in the thrown away pile of weapons and potions and rations that the Warriors of Light had discarded before Ardbert had killed them all and then himself—it meant that Ardbert had tried to tell the creature to go, that it was free. 

It seemed such a strange thing to do, even having learned how intelligent Amaro were. Meteor never quite dared asking Seto about it; though the Exarch had been more amazed that Seto had in fact survived as long as he had. A simple, short visit to Il Mheg had confirmed as much, and the Amaro had quietly thanked him. Not merely for setting him free once again but also for saving this world that had meant so much to Ardbert. 

Knowing that desperation drove them did give allow him to understand what drove these people. Hells, he had witnessed the selfsame desperation at some point, had felt it to the very bruised bones of his when he dragged himself up and up and up until he managed to give Meteor the support they needed to see Emet-Selch fall. Desperation was truly a wretched drive to have. It made people monsters if they fought for something they desperately believed in, even. 

The self-proclaimed Warriors of Darkness were driven by just that. They would rather see all souls rejoined than having them fall prey to Sin Eaters. Heavens, they would have to send the Word of the Mother off with these Warriors of Light eventually. They would have to account for a Shard hanging in the balance, and if this timeline worked the same way as the one they came from, then things would get rather ugly soon. Then again… then again, wasn’t preventing any of what came after the liberation of Doma and Ala Mhigo the very heart of their desperate attempt to fix things? Maybe Ardbert and his fellows could be spared their fate. 

Ravana fell. 

The Warriors of Darkness turned to face the Scions. 

He would have to fake having an Echo vision. The Exarch copied the little stumble that Meteor, Ryne and Krile did. 

He opened his eyes again. 

And noticed something was wrong from the way Meteor tensed. 

What had been a furious but confident smirk on his face had completely vanished off Ardbert’s face. His expression had gone slack-jawed, his light blue eyes were glazed over slightly. The dwarf beside him, Lamitt if the Exarch remembered correctly, trembled, her staff shaking ever so slightly as she blinked several times. 

“That….” she said, her eyes wide and terrified. 

Renda-Rae, Branden, and Nyelbert also all shook their heads, differing amounts of horror and plain shock on their faces as well. Whatever front they had planned on keeping remained completely shattered as Ardbert fought off the horror and dropped his hands. 

“The Echo does not lie,” Meteor said suddenly, their voice level. “I know who you are, Warriors of Darkness. And you know our reason for coming here now.” 

It took Ardbert a few more moments to completely shake off his shock. “You… the Echo would not lie, that much is correct. But this… this…?” 

He threw a cautious glance at Meteor. Their expression remained calm and focused, eyes locked with Ardbert the entire time. A faint hint of pain—knowing their story from their arrival on the First to the very moment that they triumphed over Emet-Selch meant that they were once more facing an ally, a close friend whom they shared their sorrows and their hopes during that journey with as an enemy. 

“Ar...bert, what do we do? What _should_ we do?” 

Muttering broke out amongst the group opposing them, the air still choked with the heavy fire- and earth-aspected aether that the defeat of Ravana had not quite gotten rid of yet. 

Meteor put a hand on their sword. “We could end this here and now if you so desire.” 

“There is a rat,” Renda-Rae hissed and flicked an ear up to a hive. “Engaging these fools seems unwise.” 

“Retreat it is?” 

“Retreat it is,” Ardbert confirmed, swinging his axe just in time to deflect a dagger that was thrown at him. 

A moment later Lamitt was gone, and her teammates followed in her wake—the Warriors of Darkness were replaced by Thancred who jumped off his vantage point, to the general relief of everyone. 

The Exarch meanwhile made a mental note to warn Elidibus that the next time he met with the Warriors of Darkness he might be met with uncomfortable questions. 

* * *

It happened on their way to Anyx Trine. They knew that Lady Iceheart was on her way to Ishgard as a representative of the heretics, while Lady Lucia was currently talking to the dragon Vidofnir if she did want to come to the city as a representative of the dragons. He was fairly content exchanging information with Thancred, with Ryne walking almost happily between them despite her having sworn to not let anything slip. 

One moment he was fine. 

The next moment a wave of nausea hit him and he had to stop to gasp for breath. Meteor immediately stopped as well to ask if he was alright, but a dim, dull voice instead rung through his ears. He had heard that before, of course—it sounded as if something or someone the Crystal Tower considered either an intruder or someone in danger was within its walls currently. He shook his head. 

“Just a tad dizzy and nauseous,” he said as he quietly shot out a request for proper information. 

The Forelands were far enough from the Tower for its communications to be rather limited, unfortunately. It merely seemed as if a large amount of blood was being spilled, and an unidentified source of aether had entered the Crystal Tower at the same time. Whether those two were related or where precisely that was happening he could not tell, but it was within the upper strata of the Syrcus Tower. 

Possibly the Ocular, which narrowed down the people who could be in there down to five. The question remained: who? And why? And what was the blood being spilled alongside the strange source of aether? 

“We will report to the Lord Commander once we hear whether an agreement between Ishgard and the dragons has been made, and then I think it is best we get Exarch here some rest,” Ryne said, an unspoken question on her face. 

Oh, whichever Ascian thought they were hilarious putting the Crystal Tower into alert mode, he would have to have some stern words with that immortal. 


	55. ACT VII: Beyond History's Weave, Part 6

His teeth were chattering by the time the general conversation was over and done with. Several parties seemed angry, others were plain confused, and he still had a droning headache caused by an angry deity that once had done a hilariously terrible job of raising him trying to bludgeon him into obeying Her. On the other side, less of a pull and more of a furious hold, was Zodiark reminding him that he was under no circumstance to strengthen Hydaelyn while she was growing weaker.

Another convulsion as he fought off the urge to dig his hands into the barely visible aether of the Word of the Mother and drag her back down where she belonged according to Hydaelyn. All while another voice told him to leave her, or better yet: kill her once and for all now that it was as simple as tearing his hands through her aether and using but a small impulse.

A small impulse that might kill him for the… the….

He had lost count how many times over he had possibly died on this day alone.

The Word of the Mother continued ranting at Lahabrea, who stared at her with surprisingly blank eyes and let it wash over him. Not too long ago he would have done the tearing and scattering her aether all over the premise without as much as a single moment of hesitation. Emet-Selch had his face buried in his hands while the Warrior of Light—sworn enemies, normally—rolled their eyes at him and said that barely thought-through actions had consequences. It sounded like a conversation Alexis and Hades would have had in a distant and lost past.

Hythlodaeus froze when Elidibus all but suddenly appeared in front of him, squatting down and without as much as a single word pressing his hands over Hythlodaeus’ ears.

It quieted both the snarling Hydaelyn and the murmuring Zodiark, surprisingly enough.

“You needn’t speak, blink twice to confirm and do nothing to let me know I am off—but there is something I wish to discuss with you. Privately. Would you be opposed to that?”

He remained still, and Elidibus nodded.

“… They are tearing you into their directions again, are they not?”

He blinked twice.

“Are they tearing you apart?”

He blinked again.

“Will you… be alright?”

There was a shocking amount of concern in his voice, and Hythlodaeus knew that deep down he never quite hated _this_ Elidibus. He just happened to have been his father’s apprentice. It wasn’t as if Ophion before the end of days had only ever done things out of dedication to his father—if he had truly been dedicated to Rafael only, then certainly he would not have closed both eyes to whatever Hythlodaeus got into with Hades so many times.

Hythlodaeus settled for a vague shrug in the end. He did not know if he would be alright. He did not even particularly care as of right now.

“I think you can let go now,” he whispered softly, this mortal body technically dead seven or more times over and his voice incapable of mustering any strength. “But thank you.”

* * *

Unsurprisingly, the Seer had always been a lonesome position. Many took to rummaging about the city and its constraints, others plain left to travel without a notice and returned only to appointed meetings. The Gerun before him had been one such soul, their restlessness being the reason why they were chosen in the end. After all, many saw things differently—and a Seer was supposed to offer observations through different means. Whether it meant that they were chatterboxes who relentlessly pursued the public’s opinion, restless travellers who learned more and more about the star than any other soul, or the very few souls blessed and cursed with foresight. Architects and Messengers, Emissaries and Speakers, even Silencers and Unbelievers were easy enough to find. People who adhered to rules.

And Hythlodaeus knew he had marked himself more a Seer than an Architect by cheerfully refusing the position. Architects played by the very rules of architecture they created, while their closest underlings were the ones that dealt with the everyday construction. Hythlodaeus had thought himself happiest when he was just that underling, the so-called Chief and wanted to preserve that. Architecture followed rules, rules that Emet-Selch oversaw and that he followed.

Followed until a more delicate flourish was needed, and thus he refused the honour. He would not be able to make these rules. But he could follow them and add to them where necessary.

He observed, and through that observation offered his own betterments for what already was supposed to be a rule.

In contrast, an Emissary was supposed to keep the peace. They kept every voice in a discussion level, heard every opinion and every complaint, and thus ensured it all went right. Politicians, often great mages or scientists as well.

Despite having been the previous one’s apprentice, there were some key differences between this Elidibus and his father. First of, Ophion had more of a temperament. Bad for emissaries in theory, but it worked out in his favour due to how animated the survivors soon became. He tried—it was inexperience and the fact that the opposing side was led by someone even more stubborn than Hythlodaeus that saw him fail to reach an accord with Venat and her dissidents.

He dragged a hand down his face.

The uppermost part of the Crystal Tower was a throne room. The water and the crystal looked breathtaking in the morning and evening sun, ablaze with a fire that never consumed as much as actual fire did. And at night, it had a certain charm to it as well despite the fact that the tower shone just as bright if not brighter than the stars above. It added both a wonderful yet eerie touch to it.

Just as eerie as this was.

Were any of the Scions here, it would have looked as if the Ascian Elidibus was meeting with another red-masked and black-clad Overlord of their kind. Upon looking closer, they would have realised that his robes were plain and without metallic accents of any sort. Even his mask was plain in comparison—not that he had ever been one for showing off some, but the fact that they Unsundered had styled their robes and masks after something that warriors on a battlefield would don spoke volumes to him.

“Part of me did not believe you would come in the end,” Elidibus said in Amaurotine, and Hythlodaeus shrugged vaguely in return. “But thank you. I shall keep this as brief as possible for both our sakes, Seer. But there is something that bothers me.”

He was not quite sure what to expect from that. Even in the past, many people had said that something or other about Hythlodaeus bothered them in some way. His lack of control over powers he never asked for in the first place. The fact that he knew the future and never shared it with anyone, not even necessarily the Convocation unless he was required to speak about it. The fact that he never lied as if he were the Angel of Truth despite speaking naught but the truth about visions being one of the few rules that people with foresight agreed to unless they wanted their Echo silenced forevemore.

“The ending has not changed, has it.”

He snorted. Loudly.

“The Oracle of Light and the Architect both indirectly asked the same before. You can guess the answer easily, Emissary.”

“If you would not mind, I would prefer hearing you confirm it with your own words.”

Hythlodaeus sighed and rolled his eyes. “It has not. It ends as it ever has—an unidentified power source, a blow to shatter the Unsundered, and my vision goes black knowing the end of creation as it is… is on hand. The rest of the path is perfectly obscured and impossible to track,” he said and raised both hands to put them over his borrowed, supposed-to-be-still heart, “but the end of it ever remained the same.”

Elidibus nodded, albeit with narrowed eyes. “There are many conflicting, outright baffling statements the Warrior of Light in particular has made. One such statement concerns you—the fact that you would willingly seek out a mortal in a recreation of Amaurot that Emet-Selch made.”

“I cannot speak for your timeline’s version of Gerun, the Seer. I presume many things are the same between the both of us, therefore I truly can only say so much: keeping the battlefield even from an observer’s standpoint is likely what he sought to do. If he presumed an unfair advantage on Emet-Selch’s side, he would have sought the Architect’s opponent to give them a piece of information to keep the upcoming battle fair.”

That, and a concern that had been at the back of his mind ever since he had heard about this himself.

A recreation of Amaurot seemed extreme even for someone as nostalgia-driven as Emet-Selch could be. It more sounded like a desperate plea for help that fell upon deaf ears amongst the Unsundered, the Ascended and the Sundered all at once. Trying to recreate the timeline the four time travellers hailed from was something that all four from this timeline were doing by themselves he had learned, from Elidibus’ little Warrior of Light to Emet-Selch, Lahabrea and himself.

Recreating an entire city and filling it with soulless shades seemed more a cry for help than anything else—and he did not doubt that the other him would have seen through that immediately. Posing as a shade in the eyes of the Sundered was easy enough, and the ‘shade’ of him had been brazen enough to fully admit that they had been close once, close enough that he understood things. Evening the battlefield, as if to tell Emet-Selch that he had heard the cry for help.

Still, he shook his head. “Whatever his intention, I cannot say I know for certain. These are but idle speculations based upon what I know about the future you hail from.”

Elidibus crossed his arms. “Thank you, Seer, for your as ever to the point words. But this raises another question—an unidentified energy source?”

He shrugged vaguely. “I do try to keep track of things, but it would appear that I did not quite assume one Zenos yae Galvus would truly ever get to this point. Arrogance on my end, perhaps; endings change often and frequently depending on which choices are made. The fact that this ending remains the same… is not reassuring in the slightest.”

The other Unsundered sighed loudly and raised a hand to his mask to readjust it. “It certainly is not. Thank you for the answers, Seer. Your assistance is much appreciated.”

* * *

He was stuck, for a lack of better descriptor. Despite being perfectly fine, every single person insisted on him remaining in the Crystal Tower alongside the Word of the Mother and Lahabrea—the latter only locked to this place due to the former saying she was not going to let him out of her sight.

They made for a sorry little party, sitting cross-legged as far away from one another as they could in yet another circular room inside the tower. The others had said they needed to find some supplies necessary for the tower’s keeper and for the Word of the Mother. And thus, he soon realised with a wry smile, they were a party of one fully allied with Zodiark, one fully allied with Hydaelyn, and one who was both yet neither at the same time. The Word of the Mother at the very least was true to her words and kept her eyes brutally focused on Lahabrea the entire time despite the fact that the Speaker was simply sitting there with one hand pressed against his face in the same place where Igeyorhm had torn a hole into his aethersight. While not physically blinding, it was uncomfortable at best and actively felt like a tension headache at its worst.

And the art of fixing holes like this in particular was an art that had been lost with the Sundering. Some Sundered were capable of messing with them, as the Oracle of Light could assuming the tales of her subduing light rampant within the Warrior of Light’s soul held true, but none were capable of fixing it. Or at least making that blind spot any less painful, even if Lahabrea’s soul had worked to see the worst of it healed by itself.

The Word, meanwhile, sat there like a beacon of light that stung if he looked at her for too long. Without a vessel to pour her boundless light into, they had instead almost hopelessly placed a piece of Auracite near her—as Meteor said, only to contain her presence until they figured out a solution due to her refusal to be called shadowless.

The silence went on for what seemed like an age, her eyes not leaving the Speaker once the entire time. Eventually, however, he grew rather bored of this pointless three-way sit-off they were having in this room.

“Pray excuse me, err, Antecedent?”

She threw a quick glance at him with her crystalline blank eyes and then immediately snapped them back to Lahabrea.

“Might I ask what about Lahabrea has your attention so entirely consumed?”

“It is as I said—I do not trust him. Any moment he spends out of my sight is a moment he may as well be using to cause further havoc, and as Scion of the Seventh Dawn I cannot permit such. Besides—you see this as well, do you not? This… horrible… thing right where one of his eyes ought to be.”

A soft groan from Lahabrea, and Hythlodaeus raised an eyebrow at her. He had not quite considered _that_ possibility yet, but….

“Say, Antecedent. Other than the ‘horrible thing’, what else can you tell me about what Lahabrea looks like to you as of right now?”

She seemed genuinely confused, if not offended for a moment from the way her aether bristled. Seeing something as drenched with light as her soul move much was quite nauseating in a sense, but it was a reminder that despite the fact she was awash with Hydaelyn’s aether she was still very much a living being.

Another long moment of uncomfortable silence spread throughout the room, a veritable pillar of light quivering from side to side debating whether to entertain this one person’s request, while the other presence was dragging its fingers over a horrendous wound that had stopped bleeding but that had not entirely closed yet.

“If I did not know any better, I would presume him a lightning sprite,” the Word of the Mother eventually hissed. “A lightning sprite in the shape of an Au Ra the colour of flame, mind, but electric and erratic nonetheless—with a glaring hole that appears to be lashing out at the sparks that dance across the flame-coloured lightning.”

He nodded. “I know you have no desire, but what would you say I look like?”

Across the room, Lahabrea raised his head a little, one hand still pressed against his face and a pained scowl on his face. But it seemed as if he understood what Hythlodaeus was getting at.

The Word of the Mother meanwhile turned her head for a moment to stare at him, then snapped her face back towards Lahabrea.

“An Elezen, I believe? Perfect stillness. Utter chaos. Clashing against one another on a blank canvas, going hand in hand on the world’s most colourful painting. It makes no sense, yet I understand.”

“Mhm. Antecedent, I do not mean to overstep my boundaries here, but that is far from what we look like currently.”

“…?”

Hythlodaeus closed his eyes—he heard Lahabrea sigh in exasperation at nearly the same moment. Most children with strong aethersight had to be taught to close their eyes to such views; for strength never quite equalled control. People with lesser sight such as Lahabrea had to be taught how to properly see in the first place.

“While I do in fact currently inhabit an Elezen body, yes, Lahabrea certainly is not one of our scaled friends from the Far East. What you are seeing, Antecedent, is our souls at their base, aided I believe by the Mothercrystal’s knowledge of who we once were. Emet-Selch did fill you in while I slipped in and out of consciousness, and you immediately managed to single out and land a blow on the Speaker. Few Sundered can claim they immediately recognise an Unsundered when they are disguised, let alone with enough precision to pick them out in a room of strangers. As for what the horrible thing you see on him is, it is a wound torn into the outermost layers of his soul. Of course, such an injury is perceived as a soul mangled beyond repair to you, whereas it is… mildly inconveniencing at best for one of our kind.”

She was still bristling, a quiet and almost imperceivable shudder that ran through her soul that anyone but him would have had trouble picking out.

“You mean to tell me that… what your Emet-Selch said was the truth?”

“I know not what he told you in full detail, given the fact that a Primal was tearing quite figuratively and literally through my guts for disobeying Her given rules. Pray enlighten me?”

She clamped up again, her eyes still fixed on Lahabrea who still sat there grumbling.

“Very well, if you wish not to speak then you certainly do not—”

“Is this wound truly only superficial?”

He looked at Lahabrea—the Speaker had finally dropped his hand. “It was his student, sundered or not, who attacked him,” Hythlodaeus said quietly enough for the Speaker not to hear. “If your adoptive mother tore a flesh wound into your arm that someone else stitched up to perfection, it would still sting in more ways than one, would it not?”

“… That it would indeed,” she replied softly.

* * *

The Oracle seemed insatiable when it came to learning everything she could. Whether she should or should not seemed to be completely irrelevant to her as she pursued her latest bit of interest.

The Word of the Mother had requested another day to think, surprisingly enough with Lahabrea not in her sight. They once again scattered, with the Warrior of Light saying that they would need to return to Ishgard before long to ensure that they were present for the arrival of the heretics and the dragons as had been requested by the Lord Commander.

Against the protests from his companions, he left the Crystal Tower citing that he would go insane being cooped up like that, and departed almost hastily. The shores were calmer than that, and not a soul would be visiting the Keeper of the Lake any time soon—therefore a perfect retreat. He thought.

But the Oracle had apparently focused onto him.

He had thought that his abrupt departure the other day might have deterred her.

“Excuse me, Seer?” 

“Mhm.”

“Would you mind if I asked you some things?”

“If they are about me, consider your questions unanswered.”

“No! No. They are not about you in particular. They are about the Convocation.”

He rolled his eyes. “What, has Emet-Selch run out of patience to drone on and on about it?”

“No, I am rather certain he will answer anything I would ask of him as long as I word it right. But I… I fear if I ask him such specific questions he will ask where I learned of such things. And considering _where_ I found it… it might not be a good idea.”

He turned his head to look at her. “Did you learn such in your timeline’s replica of the city?”

“No. But in the ruins of Anamnesis Anyder. A-And I promise it is just some questions about the titles you all were given.”

He sighed loudly. “Very well.”

Her face lit up. “Thank you! Would you mind starting with Seer, Architect, Speaker and Emissary, then?”

She seemed… genuinely curious. Insatiable curiosity was considered a charming personality trait of children—while they were free to walk about as they pleased they were usually accompanied by people who they could turn to instead of asking complete strangers about things. It did not stop them from approaching strangers and tugging at their sleeves to ask their questions, and roaming children were usually regarded with warm surprise and entertaining their questions for as long as time permitted.

Asking about a Convocation member’s occupation in detail was something that was often asked.

Hythlodaeus shrugged and sat down. The waters of Silvertear Lake were slowly but steadily moved by the light breeze.

“The Seer is to offer a different angle for observation. Many of them roamed the star at large much like your adventurers do now, others befriended half the city to hear the public’s opinion. And others still… well, you know my accursed gift.” He closed his eyes. “Architects create the rules of, well, architecture. Not merely settlements, but aetherial structures as well, to the point that their Chiefs generally take care of the everyday nonsense while they tackle grand projects. Emet-Selch’s predecessor was famous for her intricate design for hanging gardens, for example. Speakers on the other hand do precisely that—they speak, usually for the Convocation in front of the general population. They are commonly seen as our… their leaders, meaning that every Lahabrea has to tackle both the possibility of all ire being thrown at them in particular and the rather realistic danger of their ego expanding so much it comes to an ego death. The Emissary meanwhile is to smooth over, whether amongst ourselves or with foreign dignitaries matters little. They are supposed to be a calming presence that observes just as the Seer does. And, of course, they are to hold neutral ground between our arguments.”

Ryne nodded enthusiastically. “That certainly explains why you four act the way you do sometimes.”

He grimaced at her.

“Inside Anamnesis Anyder we came across some other titles—granted, we only found yours and nothing else to it. But… the others. Messenger, Listener, Defender, Destroyer, Chronicler, Healer, Silencer, Unbeliever, Secretary, Keeper? Some of these do sound as if they fit what I know about Ascians, but others?”

He rubbed his temples. “You are asking a lot, Oracle.”

She beamed at him—as if she knew that he was going to tell her now that she had loosened his tongue a little. Shrewd little one.

“Mitron, the Listener. Their role surprisingly enough survived the Sundering in quite a backwards way; many islands have the custom of yelling their troubles at the sea. The Listener was to do precisely as their title said; they were to listen to the troubles of the people. Their role was intertwined with that of Seers who chose to remain in the city to pursue the public’s opinions, but more importantly they were irrevocably linked to to Loghrif, the Messenger. The last Mitron called the last Loghrif the public’s walking and talking soapbox for he carried any concerns to the Convocation and other representatives.” 

He could almost picture the pair in front of him, the Atlantean and the Lunarian who last held the title. The rough edges Mitron had that Loghrif effortlessly smoothed over, the way they worked together like a well-oiled machine even when they had a petty spat of sorts. After all, Loghrif would say with a laugh as he fiddled with one of his bent ears, the sea was both calm and vicious and Mitron represented that duality to perfection. 

“Pashtarot the Defender and Fandaniel the Destroyer do not work together and more represent a duality necessary to maintain a city. One can defend for all eternity and see their own people waste away—eventually one is needed to drive out whatever endangers the people. Make no mistake, Amaurot harboured no ill will and would never have marched against another city. The chance of something encroaching our position was still there and the Defender’s forces needed to be prepared for that. Whereas the Destroyer’s forces were necessary to spearhead an offensive against such invaders. Back when the first ones laid the foundation for Amaurot, there were times where warfare specialists were needed. By the time the last Pashtarot and the last Fandaniel came to hold their titles, both positions were held by people who wished to protect their people, even if the last Fandaniel never quite warmed up to working in a large group.” 

Not exactly a loner, but someone who worked best when left off their leash. A leash that no one quite wanted to let go of, given their destructive nature in the name of protection. 

“Altima the Chronicler… well, perhaps merely calling her Historian tells you what she did. It likely were her and her predecessors chronicles you came across in Anamnesis Anyder. Halmarut the Healer… ought to be rather obvious as well. Hers was the Bureau of Medicine, and each and every single Halmarut devised that which made our long lives even longer.” 

He noticed that the Oracle had also sat down and looked at him with wide eyes. He truly, truly felt as if he were back in Amaurot with a little one asking him all of this—and he was not quite sure he liked this. 

The topic had never come up, but Alexis in particular had started jokingly needling him about taking care of a child either as caretaker or by plain adopting one. Emet-Selch had always been allergic to that conversation in public, and before either of them could bring it up the end of times had started encroaching their position. 

“Nabriales the Silencer and Igeyorhm the Unbeliever are two peculiar roles—the Silencer is in direct opposition with the Speaker, meant to serve as someone whose main concerns are secrecy. In tandem, Speaker and Silencer usually work out how much of truly troubling news the public needs to know to prevent panic, or how to deliver the full truth without sapping hope out of them. The Unbeliever meanwhile serves as someone who keeps personal attachments out of their decision-making, while lacking the Emissary’s gentle neutrality. An Unbeliever can and will call for the most brutal solution if they believe it the best. I believe that the last Igeyorhm in her sundered state bastardised her duties when she attacked Lahabrea, believing herself righteous by proclaiming him a traitor to their cause. She attacked despite personal attachments, after all.” 

Nabriales, meanwhile, had taken his opposition to the Speaker too far. Sundered egoism, Lahabrea had called it seethingly, had driven him to thinking himself greater than even the Unsundered Speaker and any and all Scions. It had proved his undoing. 

“Deudalaphon the Secretary, well, that role too is rather self-explanatory. If I had to compare the role to anything, I would compare it to the Scions’ Tataru Taru. Not someone who leaves their offices much. If there is one person who knows more about Amaurot than that, it certainly is Emmerololth the Keeper. Haughty, intelligent, and seeking more knowledge, each and every single one of them. Other than the Emissary and the Speaker, and travelling Seers should they be present, holders of that title tend to deal the most with foreign dignitaries. But rather than politics, it is the exchange of information that drives them. Emmerololth, Altima and Deudalaphon often work in close proximity—history of our own, history and knowledge of others, and someone who knows where to store them proper.” 

The Oracle was muttering to herself how she wished she could have shared any of that with her timeline’s Y’sthola and someone named Gaia. 

Hythlodaeus meanwhile was rather shocked that neither side had tried to silence him as he spoke of things belonging to Amaurot. After all he was sharing important information with an agent of Hydaelyn, which should have invoked Zodiark’s ire. On the flipside, he was talking about things that no mortal was supposed to know, which in turn should have made Hydaelyn even madder than She already was. 

He listened to Silvertear Lake’s waves crashing against the debris of the airship. High above them, silent due to its soul having long-departed to travel with the Warrior of Light, Midgardsormr’s corpse held its silent vigil. 

Just as silent as the first rays of light after the end of days had been. 

He shuddered slightly. 

Something was telling him that what would come next was going to be less than pleasant. And he did not doubt that for a moment—his Echo was adjusting to the new timeline ever so slowly, yet the ending still remained the same. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun fact: i decided the titles for the others a while back (circa Eorzean Puzzle Pieces on an Amaurotine Chess Board) bc, well, i wasnt sure i would need them
> 
> but i did so at like 5 in the morning
> 
> when i opened the document again at some point, Nabriales and Fandaniel (Silencer and Destroyer) were listed as Bitch Bastard and Motherfucker respectively bc 5am me got very fed up with thinking


	56. ACT VII: Beyond History's Weave, Part 7

Having lived in a world that lacked any sorts of politics due to the horrendous monsters hunting down the remaining population, he had to admit he had been rather interested in it. Elidibus was someone who often dealt with heavily opposing sides, and Emet-Selch was a creator of empires. But through all of this, he generally missed the conversations that took place during Astral and Umbral Eras that saw peace restored between people or trading agreements signed.

They had warned the population that the Archbishop had done worse than the heretics ever did. With Meteor and Iceheart spearheading the initiative, Unukalhai had brought up the rear. Unfortunately for him, it meant that people now recognised him, and therefore he was unfortunately requested as spectator to this nonsense.

The fact that a Primal had risen within the city walls so quietly and quickly had shocked a lot of the more staunch believers of the church into silence. Halonic priests were not abandoning their faith, of course, but many reconsidered the stance on the Vault and the church’s leadership. Which in turn was wind in the sails of Ser Aymeric and the Temple Knights—a group that had already gained a lot of traction and support following the death of Nidhogg at the hands of Estinien. There were a few voices that cited patricide and a hunger for power, but it was enough of a minority that those that harboured the thought could not find any ground to walk on. 

The meeting had begun with the historic event of the Lord Commander and the Azure Dragoon both laying down their weapons in front of the dragon Vidofnir and the heretic Iceheart. Estinien then also placed the Eye of Nidhogg down, a gesture that made Vidofnir hesitate for a moment. Even she knew the tales of the Azure Dragoons hunting down Nidhogg’s brood relentlessly because their broodmaster desired vengeance and his own eye back. 

“I know not how you and your kind deal with your fallen proper. If you would lay him to rest according to your customs, then by all means, take him to his final resting place.”

“… Many of thine kind would have gloated and kept this final rest from him,” Vidofnir said, her voice surprisingly soft, “we cannot forgive thee, but nevertheless, for this gesture thou hast our thanks.” 

“I ask not your forgiveness, Vidofnir. Vengeance drove him and I both, and his death was a hollow victory. May this be an opportunity to spare our descendants this pointless cycle my brethren under the azure banner perpetuated,” Estinien replied and bowed his head to return to his prior position behind the Lord Commander.

Empty gestures, if one asked Unukalhai—but the crowd ate it right up. Commonborn and highborn both cheered, and ironically enough the heretics and some of the younger dragons too seemed entranced by this simple gesture.

Iceheart all but radiated gratefulness when she collected the Eye at Vidofnir’s behest, a rather strange comparison to the still often violent verbal opposition she gave Estinien right until the moment Hraesvelgr shot her attempts at peace and claiming she was Saint Shiva reborn down.

The following talks of peace were droning and deathly boring—and he was not the only one of the Warriors of Light to share this opinion. While the Exarch, Elidibus and Meteor seemed to be following the conversation attentively, Ryne sunk down into her chair and was staring at the ceiling. Gerun, too, seemed to be tapping his foot—something that eventually drove Emet-Selch to kick him with a scowl. Lahabrea closed his eyes and sighed softly before swaying a simple crystal in a holster that looked like a necklace from where Unukalhai sat around.

The Word of the Mother had reluctantly agreed to pouring her soul into a proper vessel rather than barely hanging on to her form via Auracite when they all had returned from trying to find one such crystal. She had sighed out that she should have noticed the crystal-embedded accessories all of them wore sooner, and then added that she was going to continue watching the Speaker—in other words, demanded that he carried her around. Perhaps this was her way to seeing whether he was trustworthy or not. Political surveillance, Lahabrea had sighed out and agreed to her terms, as if all fighting spirit had recently left him.

If one were to ask Unukalhai, he hated politics. While he certainly lamented the fact that there were none to be had by the time he had been born on the Thirteenth, he was rather happy that he was not involved in any of them whatsoever. 

At the very least it seemed as if things were going swimmingly for Ishgard and the Dravanians.

Too swimmingly.

Something was bothering him, but he could not quite figure out what it was.

* * *

It was rather obvious that Emet-Selch had not believed him enough of a danger to keep something that even Elidibus refused him from him. Unukalhai had fought that an urge to laugh like a madman when Emet-Selch so easily and thoughtlessly handed over the secret to hollows in exchange for something he could have just as easily asked of everyone else. But perhaps this was preordained in strange ways, and after so long stewing in silence over the idea, he got his shot at it. 

The tale of the Lightwardens showed that Sin Eaters did behave in certain ways. As their exact opposite, Voidsent acted just like the reverse. There was one common denominator between Governors and Lightwardens—the strong controlled the weak. But with Lightwardens there was an automatic system in place where the aether merely sought its next suitable vessel as long as it was something with living aether still. In most cases it meant that one who slew a Lightwarden was to be the next Warden in its place. Sin Eaters rarely fought that hierarchy. Voidsent on the other hand often if not constantly fought amongst themselves, the Governors in turn simply so strong that their perishing and the power vacuum in return would cause chaos until one Voidsent rose above all else and brought relative order back into the chaos.

What had saved him in the end had been the fact that light had already taken root in his soul. Elidibus had talked about it as if it were hooks of pure light stitched into his soul, a clear sign that Hydaelyn had placed her claim on him long before anything else could corrupt him. It meant that other elements could not take root in his soul and effectively saved him from Tempering—but it did not protect against light as Meteor’s story revealed.

A shield against the other elements. Effectively, he was one of the Tempered that the Scions in the other timeline learned to untemper. Something about finding where the hooks had been placed and slowly, steadily undoing the links. Of course the Tempered fought against such procedures, oftentimes violently; the strain it placed on Tempered and Untemperer both was nigh unbearable. Not to mention the plain danger of the Tempered breaking free and pummelling their supposed saviour to death with their bare hands.

If one asked him, he would call it a minor twist on phantomology now that he had seen Lahabrea in proper action. Something a little primitive—but its status as primitive meant that a genius like Lahabrea oversaw the possibility when drafting the Zodiark concept over and over until the final draft. The Voidsent’s true intentions hid in the details of the contracts, after all. While it had certainly not been his intention to temper himself and the rest of the Convocation, once tempered very few actively sought ways of of it. 

Aetherial hooks were not exactly something many mages even on the Source dealt with. Red mages he knew dealt with their innate reserves like reverse phantomologists, black mages devoured the surrounding aether indiscriminately and white mages had eerie, flawless control over how aether behaved around targets. None of the Unsundered dealt with hooks, ranging from the naturally gifted like Emet-Selch to the extremely learned like Elidibus and even the extreme fringe cases of no control like Gerun.

Which meant that Lahabrea, in all his rush to find a solution, had accidentally created a new subset of his own magic school and never caught on beforehand and stopped caring after he got tempered.

Bizarre.

But Unukalhai was not going to let this stand. Knowing that similar hooks were driven through the Ascians’ souls now did not make the fact that he had Hydaelyn’s hands hooked into his any less a blessing. Both in disguise and proper.

After all it kept him from transforming into a monster of the dark.

It also meant that Hydaelyn knew when to retreat Her hands—the Warriors of Light that came before the last ones all transformed into monsters hungering for aether. A single bad judgement from both sides had completely and utterly ruined his home. Igeyorhm’s overeagerness and the rest of the Ascian’s too late intervention was a key cause, but Hydaelyn letting go of her supposed heroes who were starting to listen to the whispers of the imprisoned Primals they carried about.

Oh, it was hilarious.

Utterly hilarious.

“I will be back by sunset,” was all he told the others and vanished. For the longest time he had wondered how to traverse the Rift by himself without any Ascian help and soon enough hit several roadblocks that were not easily circumvented. His own curiosity as to how the Crystal Exarch had managed that had led to him letting Gerun sneak around the place before the Seer joined their little party. But alas, the machines gave him little idea how to fix his little problem. Emet-Selch’s little trick however worked. A proper hollow had an entry and an exit bridging a proper Shard to the Void with as little time spent in the Rift as possible. It was nigh impossible on the numbered ones and all too easy on the Source with its link to every single Shard. Easy enough that the spell collapsed under itself unless a certain flourish was added to it to keep the hollow stable.

Anyone older would have likely fallen victim to nostalgia when setting foot in their erstwhile home. Elidibus had sighed out that it was what had undone his Emet-Selch, that wretched nostalgia. 

Unukalhai held little love for this place. He had only the vaguest of ideas where this had once been; a place not unlike Yafaem if one had to ask for a description. Frontier had been built upon the cliffs of what was La Noscea on the Source, a last desperate vantage point as they watched the dark devour all. This place he knew was the very place the last leader of Frontier cited as his family’s birthplace, even though he had been born and raised in Frontier. 

It was where one of the smaller but more vicious Courts resided. The ones that hounded Frontier from across the mountains, across the sluggish seas that had turned into viscous sludge of utter darkness long before Unukalhai had been born. Below the surface it broiled ceaselessly, but any living creature could march across the surface just fine. 

The Warrior of Light had described their arrival on the First as quiet affair. Solemn, solitary, in a world that held its breath as if that would help it avoid breathing its last. In comparison, the winds here were violently ripping through everything for moments, forcing Unukalhai to duck down and hope it would not blow him away—and then it stopped dead all of a sudden. The only lights were that of leftover bits of civilisation; once the last lights to stand against the tide and now an eerie reminder that those that could had long since transformed into monsters. And those that could not, well, he had experienced what happened to those. And though it sounded alive, loud, the gurgle of the tempests below the surface and the crackle and pop of uncontrollable flame and lightning in the distance, he knew that not a soul remained. For light let go of the souls and left mindless monsters—dark kept those souls, left them chattering and laughing, pretending to still be living beings. They were capable of proper deceit, lied and laughed and even cried at times. Sin Eaters were quiet, immaculate. Voidsent were loud, horrendous. 

Not-Yafaem was surprisingly cold. He knew that the Cloud of Darkness controlled what appeared to be the distant, glowing chunks that he could see from his position here. Space seemed surreally warped, but Unukalhai continued marching. Perhaps it was this almost confident stride that made the lesser Voidsent he saw skulking about in the deepest shade around him hesitate. After all, nothing here lived. Those of the light had been slain, slaughtered, butchered. Tales from the far east included a survivor sobbing and telling a story of how her brother had been caught by a Governor who made a game of pitting him against its entire Court—right until he, one of the light, bested its highest-ranking one other than the Governor. How countless Voidsent had poured into the arena, Governor included, and started devouring him. The survivor had had nothing to remember him by except for this spectacle.

Yet here he was.

A living being by any other means. A soul within a body, even if it was not his own.

The wind picked up again and howled through the region. Icy, but lively. Eventually he stopped in what may have been a city square once judging from the remnants of stone pavement under his feet and the cracked ruins of buildings littered about. Unukalhai drew his staff once he heard the telltale rustle of hundreds of Voidsent moving about and around him in the veil of darkness that slowly spread. Clutched the staff close to him and bowed—once upon a time, if one of the few former mages in Frontier were to be believed, a greeting from one mage to another before a duel.

And indeed, cacophonous whispering rose from the darkness, silenced at once when said darkness coiled up and slammed something onto solid rock. The Cloud of Darkness had been incapable of killing the Crystal Exarch due to a pact. No such pact protected him other than long-buried yet never forgotten things that Frontier had uncovered before he left. He left and never returned. The Source’s Warriors of Light all were heroes. The other Shards’ were as well. The Thirteenth’s main villains were its supposed heroes all thanks to Igeyorhm’s misjudgement. 

He straightened back up, his staff still pressed against his chest.

“I greet thee, Court of Saltmoors,” he said calmly. “If you would forgive my brazen approach, there is something I wish to discuss with Oorlog.” 

The whispering rose to shrieking laughter. Hundreds of voices all at once assaulted his ears all while the darkness wavered about almost in amusement, unbothered by the tempestuous winds that still threatened to carry him away. Unukalhai calmly looked ahead still, ignoring the occasional limb that left the dark veil this governor in particular cast on its court.

“Wait,” one voice rose above the cacophony, “the little one’s serious.”

“Ooh, he is, isn’t he.”

“Has he lost it?”

“Is he losing it?”

“Look at the little one thinking he’s a hero!”

“Oh, oh, ah. Look at that feeble light.”

“Named after a star in the dark, were you, kid?”

“See where that got you!”

“Oorlog will tear you apart, boy!”

At that, he finally grabbed his staff proper and whirled around. He pointed it at an indistinct point at the wall of darkness that had been drawn around him, and Unukalhai smiled at it. The entire court had instantly fallen quiet at the sudden movement—the resulting stillness of that moment surreal in this bizarre world that never stopped running in circles around itself.

“You,” he said, the smile still on his face as he slowly trailed sudden movement with the tip of his staff, “still remember me, do you not? The star-named child you deemed to feeble to get back up after you tore through what was more sinew than muscle. A starveling child incapable of turning into one of yours due to the grip of light on its soul, yet not a challenge enough to kill and devour as worthy challenger. Oorlog of the Saltmoors—Scourge of Frontier. How many stars in the dark did you maul? Countless. I was but one of many. I bled to death, I died in agony—yet here I am once more. To give you the challenge you deemed me not. And why would you refuse—you can slaughter the last Warrior of Light of this world. Imagine the fame you could gain from that! The unexpected survivor, at your mercy as I bleed to death once again in your claws. You could usurp even the strongest of the strong with such a feat; for not even the Cloud of Darkness can boast the death of the last star name.” 

Celaeno had sworn a hundred, a million times that she would never set foot on the Thirteenth again unless it was restored. Metaphorically speaking, one of the last Warriors of Light of the Thirteenth had died that away, discarding the name she had been given as was custom whenever someone awoke to the Echo. Cyella or Cylva was her name now, still holding shades of Celaeno for she, too, was much too young to remember the name her parents had given her.

Unukalhai certainly did not remember. A child with the Echo. The name of a star belonging to the sky serpents. Something weak yet bright.

The darkness surrounding him moved.

“Let us fight under a pact, Oorlog—should you win, you get the honour of slaying the last star name. Devour me all you like, perhaps my knowledge will grant you a means to pierce the veil and invade the Source full of light. But hear me, Court of Saltmoors—should I arise the victor, you will gather under Governor Unukalhai and answer my every bidding.”

More laughter, louder this time. It was shrill. It hurt his ears as the entire Court of Saltmoors broke into howling laughter. The entire situation was absurd to the Voidsent, and he could not even fault them for it. So many Warriors of Light had risen, weak and feeble and full of the desire to be the hero they were supposed to be.

He had merely been hunted down like terrified cattle and been left to bleed to death. He had bled to death, in a sense—with his last breaths he had agreed to Elidibus’ offer of Ascension. But before death could claim him entirely, just as his sight was fading and Celaeno beside him was panicking about the kid being in rough shape and fading fast, the Emissary had interrupted that death by all but making him a lesser Ascian.

He was not here to become a hero.

Oh no.

He wasn’t even entirely here for petty revenge either.

But petty revenge was what Oorlog assumed he was here for, and slowly the veil of darkness gave form to the long-clawed beast that had killed him once before.

“Very well, child of stars. I hereby sign your pact.” 

* * *

His own fight had ended with nary more than a laugh, breathed against him as he was pressed into the ground, no more than a last taunt that no child of light would ever grow to defeat a Governor. Their time was running out, the voice had laughed and the weight had vanished, and Unukalhai had left a trail of blood as he stumbled through the Court of Saltmoors, blearily blinking and hoping to find the Evening Tide Coast once more. He never arrived. Instead he had collapsed far from the ruins of civilisation, with naught but the wind pulling and him convinced that he had _hallucinated_ Elidibus’ white robes in that very moment. 

He yanked.

Time and experience had not exactly made him any stronger. Simply more controlled. It had been nothing more than a fanciful idea that sprung up in his mind after Azys Lla. Or rather, aboard the Enterprise as they chased after Meteor. The still slightly delirious Elidibus had coughed vaguely yet reacted fast enough to catch the stumbling Scion Y’shtola after a particularly harsh turn—not that he had the strength to support her, but that movement had made the Exarch aware of what was happening and therefore the Miqo’te had made certain to catch them both.

The Scion had sarcastically joked that not all of them could whip up aether in the literal sense like ‘Comet’ could.

What was umbral-aspected aether if not something that would happily react to any sort of suggestion? It could not take hold in his wounds.

It could however bend to his will instead.

Unukalhai put on a triumphant grin, his staff in one hand and a blistering, crackling bit of aetherial rope in the other. It shone dimly and revealed the horrendous and grisly claws he had bound together—just as he had suspected, Oorlog was fast but relied entirely too much on said claws.

Using unorthodox strategies had seen his timeline’s Elidibus overwhelmed despite technically being one to expect the unexpected. The other timeline’s Elidibus had not foreseen his own victory to play out as it did. And Gerun, if the groaned mutterings of Emet-Selch were to be believed, fought downright _dirty._

Dirty like most Voidsent did.

Fighting darkness with more darkness was unorthodox but it was a wiser choice than bringing heinously weak light against overbearing darkness—after all, Mitron had done the same in reverse on the First and all but doomed the Shard to another Flood if naught was done about it.

“I would say let that be a lesson as to whom you let go and whom you personally finish off,” Unukalhai said quietly and cracked a grin, “but unfortunately, I am perfectly aware of your customs. Fare thee well, Oorlog.” 

Whimpering.

He would have expected a defiant rant of some sort as most of the stronger Voidsent were liable to break down into the moment they were defeated by the supposedly lesser mortals on the Source. No soul on the Thirteenth ever toppled a Governor, after all. That was what the few survivors all babbled in-between their oftentimes heartbreaking requests to be put down lest they transformed into monsters in the middle of Frontier. He had not grown up there. He had never considered it home. But those situations stuck with him—and Oorlog being the one who controlled the Court closest to the last bastion of mankind, with naught but the roiling sea under its walkable layer of darkness to separate them, had cost many a desperate traveller trying to reach Frontier their lives.

Or cost children trying to run away from there theirs.

Unukalhai paid the whimpering no heed. There was no point; if he showed a moment of weakness he would once more find himself bleeding on the ground. Except this time there would be no Elidibus to offer him a hand and ask if he could walk just a little further. No, either he ended the creature that ended him now, or he would not be leaving the Thirteenth again. 

Besides, it was as simple as giving the coiled aether the impulse to _burn._ It was more receptive to such antics than it was on the Source—after all, it was fairly balanced there. Here, all things active ran out of control at the slightest of pushes, and Unukalhai merely stepped back as the aetherial web he had woven around the Governor ignited and burnt its captive to naught but violently crackling flakes of ash. The eerie silence that defied the nonsensical rules of the Void persisted for a long time afterwards. 

Eventually he straightened up and threw his hair out of his face with a jerk. He glowered at the Voidsent that still crawled about this place, unsure how to proceed.

Pacts were binding. They all knew that. Especially pacts made by Governors. That was why there were so many loopholes to abuse in these; there was not a doubt in his mind that Oorlog would not have slaughtered him right away. Oh, no. Had he lost, Unukalhai would have had to bring this entire Court to the Source to allow it to wreak havoc. After all, he was the last star name to be wiped out. After even more life had been crushed and consumed and turned to violent activity rather than the almost comical calmness that mortals normally lived.

“Where’s the applause?” Out of character, especially for him, but if he wanted these creatures to fear him even more he needed to gloat about his unlikely victory. They needed to be too terrified to defy him. “Or would you join dear Oorlog as inconsequential dirt on the ground that is much better under my rule?” 

“No, nonono! Huzzah and hurray!”

“Three cheers for the stars!”

“Ahaha, long live the Governor of the Stars!” 

Pitiful and wretched, disgusting. But such was the nature of Voidsent. And whether he liked it or not, despite his claims that he was no hero, something needed to be done about the Thirteenth eventually. Even if it meant that he had to do this.

If nothing else, Emet-Selch had given him the means to easily obtain a source of aether just explosive enough for what he wanted to try next.

* * *

Ryne stopped dead as they marched through the Pillars. The Oracle had befriended a Sharlayan astrologian at the Astrologicum recently, and while she was not meant to be a healer according to the stars, she still wanted to help this Leveva character. On her way back from there, she had collected the Seer and Unukalhai, who had been discussing the weather. Likewise, Emet-Selch had somehow wound up a co-instructor for the Skysteel Manufatory’s upcoming squadron of so-called machinists—which was the place they had agreed to meet with the Ascian and the Exarch. Lahabrea had been requested at the infirmary and he had taken the Word of the Mother with him as per usual, while Elidibus once more vanished. As for Meteor, they claimed they had unfinished business regarding an Au Ra and an Elezen of some sort that none but the Exarch even remotely knew.

Her cheerful stride had stopped so suddenly that Unukalhai walked straight into her with a low oomph—the Seer stopped just as sharply and regarded the two of them with a bemused sneer.

“Whatever gives?” Unukalhai asked once he stepped away from her and smoothed his ruffled robes back down.

“Say, you… you remember the day of the first treaty meeting, right?” 

Unukalhai shrugged.

“I presume most of us present here were rather bored by the details, but yes,” Gerun said cheerfully, “we do. Why are you asking?”

Ryne turned around to look at both of them, her hands curled into fists. “Estinien. He handed Vidofnir and Lady Ysayle the Eye, yes?”

“That he did.” “Yes, yes.”

A moment passed. Why would she ask such a silly question? Judging from the expression the Seer had, he was thinking the exactly same thing. Then again, something had been bothering him ever since Estinien had handed over….

“Wait.” “Now, hold on a second there….”

Ryne’s expression was grim, her normally so cheerful face having gone extremely pale. “Estinien handed over _the Eye.”_

Gerun crossed his arms with a low hum and Unukalhai shook his head.

“Ser Aymeric would have said something had there been a second one, right? But Thordan would have needed it to feed his own ascension to Primal—yet there was no such thing to be found in the Vault.”

“Unless Meteor was too late to prevent a Tempering,” Ryne carefully began, but Gerun shook his head nigh immediately.

“Even had I not noticed it, Emet-Selch certainly would have. So cease that line of thought immediately; no one in Ishgard who is alive is tempered.”

Ryne crossed her arms with a frown. “But where is that other Eye, then? Both of them find their way into the Griffin’s hands eventually, but we are completely missing the point of Estinien getting possessed and being the holder of the Eyes for quite a while. One is with Iceheart. Where is the other one?”


	57. ACT VIII: I Spy With My Missing Eye, Part 1

Sundered though she was, she had gained her title not because it needed filling desperately but because she outdid even her predecessor. Healing was an art not many learned in great detail—most healers were phantomologists to begin with but it required more knowledge than simply that. It made sense that a learned person like Lahabrea would walk that path, but there were edge cases of people gifted with a tenacity that even the Speaker lacked. Halmarut was one such person. What she had over Lahabrea was a presence that soothed everything and everyone, likely a subtle manipulation of the aether around her if a much younger Hythlodaeus’ claims of the aether around her being strangely warped was to be believed.

She was also creative enough to not rely on her powers too much, instead often being called a potion-slinging short-tempered witch whenever it came to people disturbing her gardens. But said potions did their trick in most cases, and whenever they did not the last Halmarut was the first person to spend ages trying to concoct one that did.

He knew something was up when she approached him. Normally the Ascended let the Unsundered do whatever they damn well pleased, especially when he was concerned. Emissaries worked on their own after all, and he was no exception from that rule.

“Elidibus,” Halmarut greeted him as politely as ever. This piece of her had always been more soft-spoken than the almost comically loud Halmarut. “I know you have only just returned, but there has been a change with the Void.” 

He blinked in mild surprise. Halmarut in particular, knowing when something was in balance even without detailed aethersight, had been tasked with keeping an eye on the Void—to see that its corruption did not spread too far through the rifts other worlds could cut to it. Not too long ago she had commented on a soul getting stuck in one such rifts yet somehow managing to avoid cutting into the Void enough to be assaulted by Voidsent.

“Proceed,” he said once he noticed that she was waiting for him to confirm he was listening.

“I would like to preface this statement by saying that it is incredibly minor and likely not of much interest after all. But in recent days, it would seem that something or other that does not belong into the Void has wrested control over a small pocket of it from the Governor in place there.”

“What Court?”

“The Court of Saltmoors, Emissary.”

In the end, Frontier had scattered. Or to be more precise, they had all but thrown those with Hydaelyn’s blessing to the wolves. As this was happening, Elidibus had come across a wretchedly injured boy whose soul burned with a feeble blessing almost in defiance as he slowly but steadily bled to death. As any mortal, Unukalhai held his grudges close to his heart—secretive, perhaps, but not so hidden once he thought no one was watching him. He stared at Igeyorhm with no small amount of jaded hatred buried underneath a carefully learned blankness, and the Court of Saltmoors was what haunted his early nightmares.

“Interesting….”

Halmarut tilted her head. “… Does it warrant greater attention after all?”

“You were the last victim of one of Lahabrea’s rants on aetherial balance, were you not?”

She flinched—he very dimly remembered something of the sort happening in his own timeline much as it likely had happened here, and from the way her gaze immediately dropped to the non-existent floor below them he remembered correctly. Elidibus folded his hands together, metal claws softly clinking together as the same metal made his robes sway gently from the movement. Halmarut withstood his unblinking gaze rather long for someone who was already uncomfortable even if she did not look at him. Eventually, however, she broke and took a step backwards.

“So I was,” she breathed out.

“Do you happen to recall what his declaration on opposing elements was?”

She shook her head slowly. “No—I mean, yes. One element has two opposition; one that it overpowers and one that overpowers it All six elements have such a relationship with one another, and balance is when all exist in equal measures.”

“And the overarching elements of light and dark?”

She looked back up at him, confusion on her face. “They… in equilibrium, they… oh. Oh….”

Mentally, he cursed himself for overlooking it in the past. Lahabrea’s untimely demise had come at a bad time—he had had to rouse Emet-Selch and dispatched the Warriors of Darkness, had toyed with the Archon called Urianger, all while Halmarut had been dispatched to deal with another Shard. Then, almost suddenly, the House of Cards had collapsed in on itself because of the Warrior of Light defying all manners of logical mortal strength.

“Light and dark in equal measure cancel one another out,” he finished Halmarut’s sentence. “Much like the other elements, but astral and umbral balance is needed for both growth and stability. Thank you for the report, Healer—it does warrant greater attention. But I will personally see to it. You are dismissed.”

She bowed and hurried off, clearly relieved to have gotten out of this conversation as painlessly as she did in the end. She had been a healer in her mortal life as well, someone who worked quietly and on her own. Being in a group still startled her after so long, which he understood and quite frankly always despised. Traces of the loud and motherly yet utterly terrifying Healer remained in the Sundered, but those glimpses were far and few in-between even after she regained her memory and duty.

But Elidibus remained, once more standing there sort of lost and suddenly very, _very_ aware of how he could retrace his own steps to both victory and greatest loss at the same time.

Trying to keep everything under control while so many elements were out of said control had turned him reckless. Trying to fill the rather immense void that Lahabrea’s death at the hands of Thordan had left him prone to mistakes that led to him underestimating the Warrior of Light. One such mistake was the fact that he had let one mortal presence keep him from killing the Warrior of Light once and for all. Following that, Emet-Selch had clearly not been in a state to take care of the First. Reinvigorating the chaos on that Shard was not a task meant for one, let alone an Unsundered as heinously homesick as Emet-Selch. Which ultimately led to his demise and an overwhelmingly huge power vacuum among the Ascians.

And while elegantly woven deception and murmuring that any one soul could do the same heroics as the Warrior of Darkness, as a world so close to light, certainly spun a tale of a hero not precisely scorned but doubted in the end, he had forgotten to balance the play out. All elegant deception needed an explosion to follow it up; and the world had delivered the explosion he failed to weave up.

Elidibus raised a hand to his head, a vague headache announcing the fact that he had been overthinking things once again. He had stopped being prone to these not long after he took up the mantle left by Zodiark’s heart—and another, perhaps more startling realisation started violently clawing its way out of the depths of the abyss that was his mind.

If he was truly getting a headache from overthinking things to the finest detail once again… Lahabrea had off-handedly snarled something about nightmares to the pendant that held the Word of the Mother’s soul… and Emet-Selch had broken the rules together with Gerun with almost devilish glee and approximately zero feelings of regret.

They had all agreed to leaving those parts of themselves behind in fallen Amaurot. Even Gerun had done so before his sudden departure, although Emet-Selch at one point theorised that he had left something a little more personal behind than the rest of them. He had dreaded the mortals, had abhorred them for so long, knew that the Warrior of Light in particular was personally responsible for slaying ascended shards of Igeyorhm and Nabriales while jackhammering Emet-Selch into pieces and effectively sundering him as well at the behest of their Mother. Yet here they were, those dread parts they left clawing their way out of them once again—as if they were working with their brethren once again.

Emet-Selch had, in the end, been misled enough to accept the mortals as an equal.

But now that he stared at the Rift, at the fact that there seemed to be a small glimmer of light that might blossom one day in the Void just as Halmarut reported, Elidibus noted with no small amount of disdain… perhaps Emet-Selch of his timeline had been right.

Perhaps these mortals were worthy of inheriting a world that was not theirs by right.

* * *

“Speaker, Antecedent.” 

The rooms they had all been given within Fortemps Manor were, at Meteor’s request, a wing that did not see much use. It worked, thankfully; it let them have discussions in the city without generating too much attention—and Lahabrea in particular had almost dutifully started carrying the Antecedent’s crystal around everywhere he went. He was not happy about it judging from the often heated arguments he seemingly had with himself in the evenings, but right now Elidibus needed to speak with the Antecedent.

Desperately so, almost.

“Emissary,” Lahabrea returned the greeting.

He looked less exhausted than he had for the most part of the Sixth Calamity leading up to the Seventh. While the deep shadows under his eyes remained no matter what vessel he took, they were not a bottomless pit of swirling exhaustion any longer. He seemed more aware of his surroundings now that his mind was off the Calamities, leading to a more flippant and sarcastic version of the Speaker he had known since long before the end of days as they knew them. Judging from the way the Antecedent had been surprisingly quiet outside of her arguments with the Speaker, it seemed that she too understood something had changed rather severely.

“I apologise for intruding, but there is something I would like to discuss with the Antecedent if she would humour me for a moment or two. And lest she worries, I would request your presence as well, Speaker. So you do not have to leave her sight at all.”

Lahabrea shrugged—it was a clear sign that he was giving the speaking room to the Antecedent. Another thing that Lahabrea had not done in a long time, Elidibus realised with a morbid jolt of horror.

“Very well,” Minfilia said after a moment of silence. “But know that I will not necessarily answer, Ascian.”

“As is very much your right, Antecedent. You may perceive what happened during our first meeting as naught more than fabrication, a play, but know that my words were not lies. I did intend to meet you again on common grounds, as friends. Emet-Selch and Gerun merely… threw some wrenches into my… our plans, for a lack of better terms.”

Opposite him, Lahabrea rolled his eyes as if to sarcastically remind Elidibus that such had ever been the energy Gerun in particular had always emanated. The Antecedent was thoughtfully quiet.

It was a bizarre echo of how they had spoken to Lahabrea following the events at Castrum Meridianum, but rather than technically speaking to a prisoner he was speaking to a guest. A guest who had not been taught the full extent of her new powers yet and therefore could not escape. Something he meant to correct, something that the Oracle of Light also meant to correct whether the Antecedent chose to oppose them or not.

“In any case, let me preface this once more with thanking you for choosing to believe us for the time being.”

“It is as I said,” came the dry reply, “had you truly been out to deceive us, you would not have bled for us so readily. Or rather, plain killed one of yours. Deception only goes so far.”

Grim silence. She was likely thinking about how Moenbryda had refused help in exchange for a man who was now revealed as naught less than Lahabrea. An Ascian. Suddenly all the loud seemingly one-sided arguments the Speaker had been having with the Antecedent made more sense.

“It is of little comfort to you now, and I do believe that the, ah, animated discussions you and the Speaker were having were about this very topic, but we intend to prevent any other senseless sacrifices meant to save Warriors of Light.”

“See that you act true to your word. What is it that you wanted to ask, Emissary Elidibus?” 

He closed his eyes and folded his hands. This time, the distinct lack of metallic clinking reminded him that he still bore the unfortunate face of G’raha Tia—who was now considered an Allagan clone of the Student of Baldesion. As the story went, the Exarch awoke to a very, _very_ minor Echo that did even less than that of young Arenvald. In comparison, almost comically powerful was the Echo that his own clone awoke to. He had to hand Mistress Krile as much; her scrutinising glares were hard to withstand for those that were not used to being glared at like this or that had something to hide. Yet she still somehow treated the alleged clone as their own person, separate from the original.

“It concerns the tale that the Mothercrystal forwarded to you about… about dark and light. About Her and Him.”

The temperature in the room may as well have been below the freezing point by now—and it could not have been, what with Lahabrea keeping a steady fire and the weather outside being quite pleasant for an Ishgardian day for once. Having seen her and her little quirks before the bloody banquet in detail now, he could almost imagine her standing there flexing her hands a few times with her mouth in a thin line as she thought. Lahabrea shifted his weight onto one side and crossed his arms; a gesture that seemed so ancient that it would have knocked the wind straight out of Elidibus’ lungs were he not focused on the pendant on the table.

“… And what would you have me say, Emissary? That it is a falsification of a tale that I have never witnessed and yet have no reason to believe that the Ascians would tell the truth about it? The evidence for temporal jumps is in plain sight within the Crystal Tower, from machinery to hastily changed theories all pinned to boards and stowed away from prying eyes of people from the past that know not where to look for them. But the only evidence that your tale holds any more truth than that of the Mothercrystal is, in order, your two Zodiark-serving Ascian compatriots, technically an Ascian whose allegiance lies with none, and my fellow Scions that were told your tale in another time by another version of one of your Ascian compatriots.”

He shook his head slowly.

“No. Whether you believe Her tale over ours is, ultimately, your choice. But I would hear a confirmation out of the Word of the Mother’s own mouth over anyone else’s… has She truly claimed Him having lost control and needing to be put in shackles to protect all creation?”

“So She did.”

Bullheaded to the end, defiant to a fault. It ran in the bloody family, it seemed, and he thought he heard someone call him Ophion as he tried to beg a stubborn father, an unrepentant mother and an equally stubborn and unrepentant child to at least see eye to eye for half a bell. 

“… I see. Thank you, Antecedent.” He turned around.

“Wait.”

Lahabrea raised an eyebrow as Elidibus turned back around; the Speaker remained silent however as the Antecedent clearly thought about her next words.

Then, her voice quiet, she spoke. “Were Her words true? Was more than deserved taken?”

Elidibus opened his mouth, but for the first time since he had entered the room, it was Lahabrea who spoke.

His puzzled expression had given way to wry amusement as he finally uncrossed his arms with a shrug. “You ask biased sources, Antecedent, just as you are biased in an opposing direction. And while we are given free reign over our faculties for the most part, one would have to untemper every Unsundered for a truly unbiased observation. Many claimed such was not the case and that included a non-insignificant number of our dwindling population who were not tempered, and we Tempered agree. Other voices led by your very Mother in the end all said that too much was taken and too little given in return. None can answer your question—not even the very deities in question themselves.”

“I… I see.”

Elidibus closed his eyes and shook his head slightly. “It is as he said. And I realise too late that Lahabrea is right in one regard: you and I are both biased sources from opposing stances. My apologies for riling you up unnecessarily, Antecedent.”

He could very well imagine her blinking her bright blue eyes in surprise at that. Lahabrea meanwhile merely scoffed as if to say that this was ever the duty of the most senior member of the Convocation to watch over the younger ones.

* * *

“The theory holds merit, but I cannot quite in good conscience agree with the plan,” Hythlodaeus sighed and sunk further down the chair he had been slouching on. “True stasis and true activity do cancel one another out into a blank slate that the other elements can gain ground upon, yes. But what you suggest is, frankly, ridiculous enough to bypass the ‘strange enough to work’ quarter and fall solidly into ‘plausibly a double-edged extinction event that will devastate the Source’.” 

For all his failings as a mage, Hythlodaeus was second to none other than Lahabrea when it came to sheer aetherial theorem. He had an understanding for creation at its most base aetherial components thanks to his unrivalled sight that even Lahabrea often asked for second opinions from the much younger Seer at times.

“From the reports about this ‘Black Rose’ used for the Eighth Calamity that the Exarch’s companions left, it is easy to see that light alone near devastated the Source. As doubtlessly you and Emet-Selch of that timeline would have realised eventually either by yourselves or through gentle nudging from my side, only a Calamity of Darkness to induce dramatic change that would make Dalamud and its devastating change look tame in comparison could undo the damage wrought by Black Rose. What you would be doing should this suggestion go wrong would be unleashing Black Rose and several levels of Dreadwyrm-tier apocalypses on the Source. Simultaneously. And lest you begin with this being preferable to the Void Igeyorhm left in her wake, let me cut your train of thought off, Ophion—that would put you on equal ground as my father and my mother both. Which is not something you want to be, unhinged morals and skewered perception of mortals or not.”

Elidibus drummed his fingers on the table and twitched an ear. “I am aware of the possibilities—all of them. For as you say, one possibility is a Calamity times two. But the other possibility is salvation for one Shard lost and one Shard on the brink. Salvation—not a Rejoining.”

“You would let a coin flip decide three worlds’ fates? Not even the Children of Sirius were that foolish when it came to probability.”

He shook his head slowly. “No. I would not make the decision to flip the coin.”

“And who will you let decide, Emissary? Even should Source, First and Thirteenth all have representatives speak for them… you cannot guarantee a full agreement.”

“Is it not my duty as Emissary to mediate between such parties?”

Hythlodaeus finally sat back up straight, a dim fire glimmering in his red eyes as he slammed his hands on the table. “Bloody hells, one soul cannot decide the fate of one world, let alone one for three! Nor should one soul be the price to pay for any world!” 

“… We had this conversation before, did we not, Hythlodaeus? The very day you discarded your title and seat upon the Convocation in its most dire hour of need. Although it was not us having the conversation but rather you and your father.”

“Hmph.” Anyone else would have called the look the Seer shot him one of an offended and arrogant person, but Elidibus knew for a fact that this was the most scathing look of thinly veiled hatred that Hythlodaeus could muster.

He folded his hands. “We are rapidly running out of options. The Oracle is trying to make the Word of the Mother agree to taking a physical body and we are due for departure to retrieve her sooner rather than later. And before that, I will have to speak with the Warriors of Light from the First. Either we send the Word of the Mother to the First where she will halt the Flood on her own as she did in our timeline, thus inevitably leading down the same path that saw us coming to this point, or we see if the already shattered timeline cannot withstand another blow to its integrity. You confirmed as much yourself; the end result is yet the same. Who is to say that this will not be the change necessary to change the outcome?”

The Seer shook his head. “I repeat that your idea bypasses the ridiculous enough to work sector and shoots straight into glorious, glorious oblivion. But very well, for old times’ sake I will humour you. Let us presume we agree. Say you introduce Sin Eaters to the Void—and Voidsent to the Empty. On the Thirteenth where naught remains alive you might succeed with such haywire tactics. The still creatures would silently devour the violent tides, and if this ‘Eden’ has a counterpart in the Void as the Oracle claims, it would be child’s play for a trained siphoner like you to draw out the dormant elemental aether. But the First has living people. The Flood will be stopped in its tracks, but can you guarantee the safety of the people who survived that particular event? If you wish to introduce Voidsent into the Empty; what will keep them from simply rising past the stilled advance of light and devour the remnants of life there instead of tearing through the still ground until inevitably they hit where the elemental aether went dormant?” 

“Would you accept the Ascended as a force to ensure that none cross the border between Empty and Norvrandt?”

To his credit, Hythlodaeus stifled whatever groan was likely stuck in his throat and instead shoved his mask slightly up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “… That is a ridiculous statement and you know that. Even should the black-masked agree, would our—your brethren bearing red agree? Halmarut I can see agreeing by virtue of this being healing, and if she agrees then so will Altima. And that is where your good graces end. With Mitron, Loghrif, Emmerololth, Nabriales and Igeyorhm dead, there is no telling that Pashtarot, Deudalaphon and Fandaniel will agree to it.” 

The next words were dangerous, and he knew that before he spoke. “You very much share your mother’s narrow mind and your father’s stubborn defiance.”

“ _Excuse me!?”_ He moved his hand off his face so quickly that his mask landed on the table with a deafening clatter. He flinched at that, the anger on his face immediately deflating as he reached for the mask to put it back on his face.

Elidibus chose that moment to cut any retort Hythlodaeus could make off. “Make no mistake, this is not an insult. A view from certain angles is always necessary, and yours has ever been most enlightening for the Convocation and Amaurot at large. But much as I claimed I could and could not in the end, you cannot read a Sundered mind. Who is to say the Ascended will not agree to this duty? All of us failed with the Thirteenth and not Igeyorhm all by herself. They could see this as a chance to right this wrong.” 

“And what if they do not? Then it yet leads to the same end as ever!”

“But we will have to take that risk, will we not?”

For what it was worth, Hythlodaeus hid his frustration well now that he was back in control of himself. As a child he had been prone to frustrated rants, something that he slowly grew out of due to spending time with the level-headed Hades. “Please, for all that is unholy, tell me you are aware of your own hypocrisy here, _Ophion.”_

“I am, and I swear that upon all that is holy. It is hypocritical of me to pound upon the same argument that the Convocation dismissed your claims for. A game of chance, with lives on the line—and you once again hold your ground solidly that none of us have the right to exchange souls for survival, but it is me who pounds upon the small chance that the game of chance may work in our favour. You were dismissed, the risk of failure deemed to great. And here we sit, with me saying that this is a risk that needs to be taken.”

Hythlodaeus rubbed his temples, once again sinking down on his chair. “I admit, I counted myself amongst the ones who held minor doubts about you being able to fill your predecessor’s vacant spot, but it would seem that I was mistaken. This is ridiculous.”

Elidibus leaned back a little with a smile on his face. “Let me repeat once more, I am well aware. But let me furthermore repeat that this may as well be our last chance at changing not only the fate of the Antecedent but two worlds. I will suggest such to the Warriors of Light from the First and our only point of contact with the Thirteenth.” 

“Will those ones even listen to you? Formerly or not, I have to respect an Emissary opening the floor to a calm, equal discussion. They, sundered as they are, do not.” 

He leaned back with a sigh. “That, Seer, is something I have not quite figured out yet. I also happen to have to speak with Unukalhai on his own—unless his companion has departed from the First without notice, I believe he is to… blame, for a lack of better word, for a change substantial enough that Halmarut notifies me of it.” 

Hythlodaeus drummed his fingers on the table. “… The same change did not occur in your history?” 

“It did not. I dispatched Unukalhai to deal with the Warring Triad after enlisting the help of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn as a way to measure their dedication. With him engaged as such, he did not have the time to acquire whatever skills this one has acquired in the time since we arrived here should be truly be the culprit of finally managing to sow the first spark of light in a world without it.” 

“Huh.” 

“And with Halmarut dutifully informing me of it, I realised that perhaps Mitron’s idiotic and desperate last stand might just be the catalyst we needed after all. Make no mistake, the idea of an opposing Flood has crossed our minds but it was deemed too dangerous. With the Word of the Mother capable of stopping it before all of the First becomes the Empty _without_ losing her in the process, however… you know how even sundered the world seeks balance. There might not be as much resistance from Hydaelyn as per usual, even.” 

A long, long sigh. “Sin Eaters you can lure with enough light, I am given to understand. If the Word of the Mother merely appears as the strongest source of light, the Sin Eaters will follow her like docile lambs. But what about the chaotic nature of the Voidsent?” 

Elidibus cracked a grin and slowly removed his mask. Compared to Hythlodaeus’ red eyes, Allagan royal red shone almost grotesquely brightly—doubly so in the face of G’raha Tia before he was passed the torch by the Allagan clone royals. Next to his other eye, the red one may as well have been a warning, and Elidibus had very deliberately chosen to undo the glamour that kept this body’s eye from being as brightly red as it was supposed to be. 

It caught on, he realised—the Seer scrunched his face up in confused realisation. 

“Assuming that Unukalhai truly is the culprit and assuming that the Exarch is willing to extort some control over a gift he refused in the past, two Courts worth of Voidsent under our control may prove to be just enough. Of course, this enterprise would be left mostly in the hands of the Ascended. We do have a missing eye to contend with before we can focus on that—and as Lahabrea so often and so very angrily pointed out; I would be best suited for that particular job far away from any battlefields.” 

* * *

When informed of the conundrum, he had to give credit where credit was due; the Lord Commander acted fast. The Knights Dragoon under one Estinien Wyrmblood were nearly immediately dispatched to exclusively search for the missing Eye of Nidhogg. While, as Estinien and his adoptive father and former Azure Dragoon Alberic Bale claimed, the link between revenge-driven dragon and revenge-driven dragoon had been severed, the knights were still amongst the fastest people on the field that Ishgard had to offer. 

Iceheart, currently present in the same room for further discussions pertaining to the heretics within and without Ishgard, also offered her swiftest pathfinders to help out. 

Considering how at odds they had started, it was more than strange to see that mortals had not chosen to stew in their mutual hatred for one another and that Iceheart and Wyrmblood had instead chosen to walk a common path. 

“Still, I had thought that the Archbishop would have found the missing Eye in Azys Lla… why else would he have gone there?” 

Meteor closed their eyes. “Perhaps we have overlooked something. I do admit that my departure was… premature and driven heavily by a desperate drive to find the Lady Iceheart lest Ishgard suffers for our slowness.” 

Except that by all means, they had not been slow. Elidibus _knew_ that Lahabrea had not fallen as early as they had driven Thordan out. It seemed as if things accelerated at random and now they had slowed to a crawl since the mortal realm was currently missing its biggest threat: the shade of Nidhogg that had laid claim to the Azure Dragoon right around the time that Lahabrea had fallen. 

“If necessary, I can depart for Azys Lla immediately,” the Exarch said. 

Emet-Selch stretched. “Not on your own, you will not. Divide and conquer—I will assist the Exarch.” 

The Miqo’te immediately rolled his eyes and was about to complain, but the Lord Commander nodded. “I was given to understand that the Ironworks were busy with something in the Hinterlands for the time being, but if you need them you may find them there.” 

Meteor cursed under their breath—it would seem they had forgotten that the Primal Alexander would rise regardless of what happened to the timeline thanks to being in a stable time-loop of its own. Surprisingly enough, it was the normally so utterly quiet Unukalhai who spoke next. 

“I can go and inform Master Garlond of the current situation—I know Archon Y’shtola wanted to travel to Idyllshire again anyway. I can accompany her and inquire about the situation and lend a hand if necessary.” 

“Let me join you!” Ryne said, then immediately shrunk away a little when all eyes turned to her. “I-I… just in case a little more… heavy lifting is necessary.” 

“Make that the three of us accompanying Archon Y’shtola, then,” Hythlodaeus cheerfully chimed up, scooting forwards a little to put his hands on Unukalhai and Ryne’s shoulders. 

Meteor sighed warily. “Which leaves Emissary, Speaker and I to investigate the remaining missing Scions’ whereabouts. Naturally, all of us will go out of our way to cover whatever ground the Knights Dragoon and those under Lady Iceheart cannot.” 

Aymeric nodded once again. “House Fortemps has already offered every single soldier they can spare, spearheaded by Lord Haurchefant. Hesitant though they may have been in the case of Houses Durendaire and Dzemael, the other three houses have agreed to extensively cover the Central Highlands.” 

Iceheart tilted her head. “I sincerely doubt that anything will be found within, but let me and mine help you cover the secret pathways that we have used in the past.” 

For as dire as this situation could be, the entire room seemed to be in high spirits. 

Elidibus knew a house of cards about to collapse in on itself for some reason or another when he saw one. It was similar to how the last Convocation meeting had dissolved in casually high spirits despite Gerun all but shooting them down. And judging from the collective strange expressions on everyone’s faces, they too anticipated the fall. 

But which group would find the catalyst for collapse first? 


	58. ACT VIII: I Spy With My Missing Eye, Part 2

The tale of the Primal Alexander had fascinated her for the longest time. She distinctly remembered the way that Meteor had reminisced about it being one of the tales that had started as a mixture of horrifying and plain ridiculous and gone on to stay with them for quite a while. Y’shtola had in fact seemed rather happy to have the company on her journey to Idyllshire, even amenable to the company she was not used to in the form of Hythlodaeus and Unukalhai.

As things would have it, the Seer and the Scion were having a rather pleasant conversation as they walked. Whatever it was about, it sounded extremely technical on an aetherial level, with Hythlodaeus even nodding and continuing on seamlessly. Y’shtola in return, blinded as she was by this point, appeared to be thoroughly engaged in the conversation and had her face turned to him. The contrast between the Y’shtola she had gotten to know in Rak’tika and this Y’shtola could not be further apart, yet in that conversation a small wry smile was on her lips that made Ryne feel surprisingly homesick for the First despite the fact that Y’shtola did not belong there in the first place. 

By comparison, her and Unukalhai must have appeared to walk in brooding silence. She had not yet tried to strike up a conversation with him as of right now, but she noticed the almost unusual spring in his step and the slight smile on his face. At the very least he appeared to have gotten over whatever brooding mood she had accidentally put him into in Azys Lla—she still needed to properly apologise for that. But that would have to come later.

Ryne was content following along for the time being, at least. She had a feeling that something was bound to go horrendously wrong anyway.

* * *

Outside of being here in the first place to speak to Cid about the missing Eye, the first legs of the journey happened almost entirely as Meteor and the Exarch’s history books described it. Mide was yet another person from the Source who left an impression on her—there was something about that fierce if single-minded determination of hers that reminded Ryne of Lyna in a strange way. Mide however was more brusque than the commander had ever been.

She was rather observant, as it turned out nigh immediately after a major brawl with some of the Illuminati-faction Goblins.

“You there. Seer, was it? Your title’s because you either have an absurdly high aether sensitivity or because you learned the points of where aether converges on every bloody body of both Spoken and beastmen, right?”

She had rather quickly learned that while there was an undeniable allure to his situation that drew both light and dark in like a vortex, Hythlodaeus was a ridiculously charismatic person to begin with. Even when his words spoke the truth that he was not in the mood to smile, somehow his fake smiles looked like genuine grins. Thus she wasn’t quite sure what to make of the smile he shot Mide—other than there being a certain wry edge to it thanks to a perpetual tiredness mirrored in his dull red eyes. 

“I have to applaud your own sharp senses for figuring that out—you are correct on both counts, actually. What gave me away?”

Mide rolled her eyes. “The fact you’ve not been breaking the bones of every bloody fool pointlessly and relentlessly before settling for cracking a skull like most fistfighters. You strike very precisely in ways that completely disable your opponents before going to the breaking. Well, not that you’re much of a fistfighter. Where in Hydaelyn are you from where they teach someone to kick with such precision?”

Ryne and Unukalhai exchanged a worried luck. While the most people of their party all had an alibi of some sort—Meteor and Ryne were the children of farmers, the Exarch was the Student of Baldesion G’raha Tia and Elidibus his ‘clone’, Emet-Selch was a Garlean who abandoned country and home to help rebels and Unukalhai simply claimed to be an orphan—Hythlodaeus and Lahabrea in particular did not seem to have a detailed one. 

She nervously looked at the Unsundered, who continued wearing his smile she could not tell was fake or not.

After a long moment of silence, he merely shrugged and stretched. “Here and there. Nowhere and everywhere. Restless wanderers oft become weary wanderers—although some do not get to make this transformation and instead join with a group of adventurers that splits to research things on their own and then returning to them not only being called the Warriors of Light but also having managed to get into Ishgard of all places.”

That answer seemed to satisfy Mide, who nodded with an expression that Ryne could not entirely read.

* * *

Idyllshire’s reconstruction efforts were proceeding apace, it seemed. Where it had been naught more than a crumbling ruin when they had arrived, by now a good chunk of it had been rebuilt. Ryne enjoyed watching the crowd that had gathered here; from a botanist from Gridania she dimly recognised as Guildmaster Fufucha joining another one in the fields behind the main building to several adventurers and a handful children. One Miqo’te girl was excitedly and loudly telling a tall tale about some Primal-slaying business to another, wide gestures and dramatic changes of tone, and giggled with the other girl as she went. Quite a few adventurers stood about in a half circle and were discussing some sort of trade—judging from the various tools and one lugging what appeared to be a bag of yarn and cloth around, it seemed as if they were the sort of adventurers who travelled about to find work as for-hire artisans. 

One person walked by, and Ryne couldn’t help but cackle in delight as a horrendously muddy creature squeaked loudly and bounced after them—the muddy creature earned the person a loud scolding from a nearby Goblin.

Idyllshire reminded her of the Crystarium.

Thancred had always sounded surprisingly wistful about how the Source seemed to treat the so-called ‘beastmen’ whenever he brought it up. And even though the Fae were regarded with no small amount of fear even before the Flood if the few surviving texts were to be believed, not a single soul would have hunted them down simply because they existed. The Pixies in particular reminded him of the Sylphs from the Source, what with their playful pranks and a focus on silly if sometimes malevolent games, and having gotten to meet them, Ryne was inclined to agree. The fact that the term ‘beastman’ had only recently gone from an insult to the proper coined term for all the tribes and clans of them only added fuel to the fire.

Not to mention how many of them were tempered.

The conversation had come up between all of them and Y’shtola who was joined by Cid. Was the Illuminati faction tempered? Would this turn into an Ifrit situation where the Illuminati would relentlessly do all in their power to summon their deity over and over again, or would this turn out to be more of a Ramuh and the Touched Ones situation where the Primal was, by all means, benevolent as long as its thralls were not in danger?

As the conversation progressed—Cid was making a point that they had yet to even determine the element at Alexander’s core and therefore its nature was hard to deduce—Ryne noticed that both Unukalhai and Hythlodaeus grew unusually quiet. Apparently she was not the only one to notice as much. Once Cid finished making his point, Y’shtola tilted her head a little and flicked an ear quickly.

“You have been keeping your silence for quite a while, Comet and Seer. Is there aught going through your minds that might add anything to the conversation?”

Unukalhai’s lips were pressed together into a thin line as he very slowly shook his head. Hells, were it not for his silvery-green hair moving ever so slightly she would have missed the gesture entirely.

Hythlodaeus closed his eyes and put his hands together in front of his face with a sigh. “Merely that it might be much too early to jump to conclusions about the nature of the metal beast, so to speak.”

Ryne waited until the group scattered and even Unukalhai sauntered off claiming that he was going to check out Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum while they were stuck in the Hinterlands. Perhaps it was rude to pounce on Hythlodaeus like this, but she knew someone thinking too much for their own good when she saw them—something that Thancred had taught her in regards to Urianger but something that served her rather well within the Crystarium after the Scions departed and the Empty had been left under Eden’s control for a while.

She cleared her throat loudly beside the Unsundered.

He merely sighed again and tilted his head into her direction slightly to signify that he was listening.

“You do have something on your mind. Would you mind sharing it with me?”

“I cannot bribe you to run off into the Arboretum after young Unukalhai and to leave me alone for the time being, can I? I jest, I jest, stop glowering. Yes, there is something on my mind and yes, I do mind sharing it. But between you needling me for all eternity and simply speaking, I suppose I will take the easier route for once in my forsaken life. But not here. Let us join our wayward little mage ere I say what occupies my mind.”

She shrugged at him and then signalled that she was going to follow. For someone who allegedly minded saying what he was thinking, he certainly did not show that he was bothered the slightest. In fact, he even made certain to not pop out of a portal in front of Unukalhai and called for him as to not startle the life out of the mage from the Thirteenth.

The Arboretum also fit every description she had ever heard of it. Wild, overgrown—breathtakingly beautiful in ways that were hard to put into words. Sparkling water, horrid squelching mud, and plants that she had never seen on the Source and certainly not on the First either. They walked for a while until Hythlodaeus stopped at an elevated platform. Apparently this was where some adventurers had dispatched a creature that had taken over the Arboretum in its keepers’ absence, a Voidsent of all things whose presence lingered ever so slightly in the dense aether of the greenhouse. A smudge of deep, deep darkness that was drawn through the elaborate tapestry that was the balance needed for such lush growth.

“Without much preamble, it is the concept that your Primal Alexander was based on that has been haunting my mind ever since the conversation went to Primal nature. Most Primals have their origins in folklore from before the End of Days, another good amount clearly draw upon concepts that were in fact created in and around Amaurot. Ifrit and the very concept of phoenixes right down to the Primal Louisoix became both draw upon creations by Lahabrea. Others such as Garuda and Leviathan are based on old folklore from appropriate places. The Lunarians believed that harpies under one called the Empress of Gales rose the floating islands of their region into the skies, and the word ‘empress’ in the Lunarians’ native tongue sounds eerily similar to the word ‘Garuda’ if one lacks an Echo of Understanding. Leviathan meanwhile was the creature who taught the people of Atlantis how to weave their magic so they could build their underwater city without fear of the bonds breaking unless the very laws of nature come undone around them if they swore to keep the seas around Atlantis safe.”

She had suspected as much after a while, especially considering how Lahabrea was technically the father of primal nature. He knew a shocking amount of things still despite how fractured his memories were, and despite clearly being focused on Amaurot as a whole he seemed invested in many things outside of the city. Of course someone like that would feed all the lost folklore and myths into a new place—even if they were to be eikons of destruction in that case.

“Bismarck, Ravana, hells, even the bloody Moogle King to some degree have their roots back in actual existing myths and legends and whatnot from across the star. Whether these tribes remembered on their own or whether Lahabrea in particular fed tales about them to the early tribes after the Sundering, your souls remember even if your heads and hearts do not. But… there is no equivalent to Alexander. One would think that clearly it came from the city of Alexandria, which would make the Lady Mide’s involvement an ironic echo—Alexandria was the home of the Ancient Raen, not the Ancient Xaela. But no. Machinery like Alexander was in fact the volcanic twin cities’ speciality—but no such thing was reported by the few survivors.”

Unukalhai tapped the marble floor with his staff a few times before shaking his head. “… There was a Primal called _Alexandria_ on the Thirteenth. The Marble Queen Alexandria, terror of Queznhae—slain and contained by the Warrior of Light Enif who in turn became the Iron Devourer Alexander. The Marble Queen was very far from this Alexander, mind, but the Primal gained infamy through taking down a supposedly impenetrable fortress in the Znhaen mountains and enthralling the survivors to do her bidding. A small group who managed to flee turned the tide on her thanks to Enif being a crafty alchemist and concocting something that took out her thralls and enabling the survivors to slit every thrall’s throat while he took on the Primal on his own. The Iron Devourer Alexander was described as more metal than man, more fortress than living being. He was possibly the least destructive of the Fallen Stars, but the Court of Ironmarble was one of the stronger factions until the very day the Flood devoured us all.”

“Interesting,” Hythlodaeus muttered and started pacing. “Given the Source and all Rejoinings, I would not be surprised that something bled into the place as the Umbral Eras progress. But with the Thirteenth being what it is, has the story of your Primal and Primal-corrupted bled into the dim, distant memory of a lost city and somehow taken root with the Goblins of all the people on the Source? How widely spread is the Court of Ironmarble?”

“Not much, and they rarely if ever answer the calls of thaumaturges. There were instances of lesser ones accepting terms and contracts but… well, they were lesser rungs.”

They both started discussing implications of such a thing, but Ryne narrowed her eyes.

Something did not make sense. Or rather, there was an inconsistency.

Unukalhai claimed that he had been born long after most knowledge had been lost and most places had lost their names. Few people and even fewer records had survived and those that huddled at the last bastion of mankind had all discarded their heritage and differences to survive together.

How in the world did he suddenly know the specific history of one place?

* * *

She got her answer sooner than she expected it. As uneventful as an unchanged history was, she quite enjoyed the moon she and the others spent in Idyllshire helping speed the research along. Tempered or not, Y’shtola eventually admitted, the fact that the Illuminati seemed unaware of their Primal clearly having its own will was more concerning and more pressing than most other matters. Mide hissed at that, but eventually relented that Alexander perhaps was the bigger threat here as well, Goblin faction wars be damned.

As unchanged history went, however, she knew that they would be confronted with what Meteor took care of on their own. And Alexander in particular had turned into a time marathon of endurance and avoiding paradox bumps in the end to link a stable time loop together—very much not unlike the careful constructing the Exarch had done with the timeline to ensure its integrity and the plans that they had to discard once things got out of hand.

Unfortunately, there was one key difference between Meteor on their own and all three of them combined. Staring at Alexander, Ryne realised with a jolt of horror that the shields that Meteor could throw up with their control over the dark arts were something none of them could conjure up; which likely meant that Alexander would wipe the three of them out with holy light. Hythlodaeus had, with a wry smile and a request to get picked up before his body was crushed into a bloody pulp, thrown up a shield of some sorts as the Primal attempted to blast them into pieces. The Unsundered stood there for a second after, then his eyes rolled back and he collapsed without as much as even a sigh—she dully remembered the others saying that he was not a mage with control over his powers and that using them for more than blatant explosions meant to knock him and his opponent out generally left him in extreme pain if he did not straight up faint. But in the time it took her to register that the Seer was down, the Primal had reappeared in a flash of bright light and scattered feathers.

Ryne had taken to carrying around a satchel with several concoctions and remedies around due to usually the party lacking their sole healer. She started rummaging around to retrieve one of her half-crushed and scraggly scarlet pinions that rejuvenated whoever she used them on and failed to notice that the Primal had turned onto her. Staring up at it with one hand on a dagger and the other one holding a small feather she genuinely expected to be seriously hurt when she noticed a sparkle of light.

Instead, she saw a flash-step of void fire followed by an entire dark wall that writhed horrendously in front of her—the blast of light was redirected away from her and she heard the screech of a dying Voidsent.

“Wake the Seer up,” Unukalhai called and she saw that he had tossed his staff aside in favour of what must have been some sort of leash made out of rancid void aether while sickly light glimmered behind him.

Ryne dove forwards, both relief and horror surging through her veins. Relief because she found that Hythlodaeus seemed to be conscious again by the time she reached him, although all he did was wheeze pathetically. Horror because the yowling of Voidsent was right behind her back and every hair on her body stood up from the sudden change in aetherial charge in this place.

“Knew it,” Hythlodaeus choked out when she helped him sit up properly. He pressed one hand against his head with another low groan. “Don’t bother. I think I’m gonna be sick. Go and help our little voidsent summoner instead. And yeah, yeah, I’ll move if need be. Just… just… give me a moment here, Oracle.”

With a shudder and a nod, Ryne stood back up and turned around.

Just in time to see some bizarre winged creature that looked like a mockery of a serpentine dragon like Midgardsormr rise behind Unukalhai with a bellow so wretched it chilled her right down to the bones. But rather than give in to that fear that would have left her paralysed years and years ago on the First, she shook her head and drew her daggers. After all, a voice that sounded a suspicious lot like one of Gaia’s rare but genuine giggles told her that hesitation out of fear ill suited her.

If nothing else, their general rhythm continued despite his almost drastic change in combat style. Having watched many an arcanist and having worked with Emet-Selch’s egi she knew that there was a certain amount of sheer control required to command even one sort of arcane being around—let alone the supposedly uncontrollable Voidsent. Yet Unukalhai seemed to not even break a sweat as he controlled several imps at once. Hells, the thing that was draining him appeared to be the fact that rather than be a still-standing mage like most of them, he now had a shocking amount of mobility between his attacks.

She struck directly, Unukalhai followed it up with a flurry of smaller blasts that churned and twisted for a moment before dissipating altogether. When she had to back up and shot a blast of light at the Primal’s soul, Unukalhai ensured that not one reprisal attack hit her.

Were they allowed to fight like this out in the open, Ryne realised with a shudder as she bolted out of the way of yet another beam of light that tried to incinerate the ground beneath her feet, near nothing on the Source would be able to withstand their relentless assault. Was this why so few rose to challenge Paragons? Was this why Hydaelyn sought people strong enough to hold their own and then made certain they gathered enough power to at least oppose them with some force.

By the time Hythlodaeus rose to his feet again, the Creator had fallen. Glimmering, glittering light remained, sparkling as it vanished between the flickering remnants of sickly green void fire. The flames were quenched at the almost casual wave of a hand, and Ryne said nothing as the Seer half leaned against her with one of his hard to read smiles.

“I had thought something about your aether was strangely umbrally charged. Although Elidibus led me to believe that you had no way of entering the Void at your leisure—or travel the Rift to begin with.”

Unukalhai… sneezed. Then he shook his head. “And you would be correct with that. Any travel I did was limited to whatever Shard I was brought to; returning to the Rift or even crossing it was beyond my capabilities.”

Ryne blinked several times in confusion. “That implies someone taught you how to. But who would—”

A long, long groan interrupted her. Hythlodaeus, still leaning against her, had slammed his free hand against his forehead. “Oh, heavens. Emet-Selch taught you how to cross the Rift, did he not?”

“How… how would you know?” Unukalhai’s voice was surprisingly quiet, shocked even.

“Elidibus clearly never taught you. I certainly never taught you and I lack blank episodes in my memories to warrant that I during one such episode did teach you. With all due respect, which is very little may I add, Lahabrea is and remains a stuck-up and very angry old man who never teaches something unless he deems the student worthy. And you, sundered as you are, are very much not worthy. Which only leaves the Crystal Exarch who is eliminated by the fact that his way of crossing would require the Crystal Tower and therefore him, and Emet-Selch. The tower vanishing would have been visible, therefore the Exarch very clearly cannot have. Which leaves… the Architect—and you confirmed that this was the case.”

Unukalhai once more pressed his lips together into a thin line and then nodded grimly.

Ryne sighed and shrugged. “You very nearly gave yourself away earlier. Not that I would have expected whatever all of this was, but you suddenly had knowledge that you claimed you did not have due to it happening before the Flood of Darkness.”

The mage flinched, then crossed his arms. He must have been aware of how he had given himself away to her in particular.

But Ryne frankly did not care about his usual standoffishness. There were so many questions burning under her tongue that Hythlodaeus must have felt her vibrating from excitement, as Thancred liked to put it. “Though, if you do not mind—what exactly were you doing? It was both terrifying and impressive at the same time!”

“… Err.” The mage seemed someone taken aback by her sudden excited tone.

“Please! It reminded me of how I used Eden to revitalise the Empty; did you actually take my words to heart?”

“N-No. I admit I thought about it, but the Void is a different tier than your Empty was. I merely went and took over a Court—being the Governor now, they have to answer my bidding. I… I suppose you could compare it to the Garlean beastmasters under van Gabranth. Except that I control Voidsent.”

“That’s amazing, Unukalhai!”

The Unsundered beside them let out a chuckle.

“I admit, the umbral charge is what made me tag along—and I cannot quite say I regret it. But do enlighten me here, did you bribe dear Emet-Selch?”

There was a long, long pause. Eventually Unukalhai rolled his eyes and picked his staff back up.

“No. I merely used his ridiculous laziness to my advantage,” came the dry reply.

For a moment it was quiet.

Then Hythlodaeus broke into howling laughter.

* * *

It would be another few rises of the sun before they would travel back to Ishgard to reconvene with the others, Y’shtola said—she still needed to discuss something with a Goblin mage of some kind in relation to trying to figure out how precisely Alexander could have been planning a stable time loop in regards to itself and Mide from the very moment the Illuminati called it into existence once again.

As much as she liked Idyllshire, however, she very quickly learned that there were some downsides to it. Namely, the adventurers that came and went with little to show for their presence. Or rather, the ones that wanted to know about the ones present.

The impromptu festival that the people of Idyllshire threw to celebrate the defeat of Alexander had drawn in quite a crowd of travellers. Many decided to stay another day, others left their workshops and it was all around endearingly like Mord Souq and Twine after the return of the night. But much like these celebrations, it was far too easy for one person to deliberately or accidentally become the centre of attention.

The centre of that attention right now was, of all people, the Seer. As one somewhat drunk adventurer sitting beside Ryne bemoaned, it was the fact that he had a charming smile and an unfortunately attractive face for an Elezen piece of Chocobo droppings. Indeed, of the travelling adventurers, most of them appeared to be trying to get his attention by relentlessly flirting with him. The worst thing about it was the fact that he appeared to be used to that sort of attention—all the flirting seemed to bounce right off him and he very graciously declined every single drink.

Unukalhai beside her was eerily quiet and almost gloomy, thankfully warding off any sort of unwanted attention once the drunk adventurer decided it was about high time he got his sister away from someone who clearly was not interested in her, as he put it, pathetic drunk bottom. With the space free, Hythlodaeus all but swept in and basked in the gloomy aura of Unukalhai warding off any more attempts at getting his attention.

“You… seem used to this,” Ryne eventually said softly, and the Unsundered beside her sighed.

“Fortunately and unfortunately, some things never change—Sundering or no. You, on the other hand, seem surprisingly bothered.”

Somehow seeing him lacking his usual slight smirk was more upsetting than the inability to tell whether he was genuinely smiling or putting on a fake grin. It made him look almost too comically serious for someone in a situation that truly was no laughing matter.

“I… suppose.” She truly did not want to admit that she was almost comically homesick by this point—the similarities between the First and the Source suddenly all too glaringly obvious. Although she had the sneaking suspicion that the Exarch had married Source customs with what the people of the Crystarium wanted to preserve once they settled down around the Crystal Tower.

Unukalhai beside her sighed loudly. “It may be naught more than an educated guess, but I reckon she misses the First. Cel… another Warrior of Light from the Thirteenth had the same melancholic look and air about her whenever she thought too much about her… our home. Gaia in particular, I presume?”

Ryne shot a quick glare at him, but Unukalhai remained shockingly stoic and quiet as he held her glare.

Hythlodaeus on the other hand tilted his head a little. “Homesickness I can understand—but who, pray tell, is Gaia?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Thinking about her being left in a world on the brink hurt in many more ways than she was willing to deal with, especially since the Crystal Tower alongside the Warrior of Light, the Exarch and the Oracle of Light had vanished likely just before the rest of the Crystarium went up in flames. And while they could flee to Eulmore, could flee to the Empty with its fledgling life, run to Eden and to the ends of the very world itself, there was no outrunning the deities that had made this world what it was. Gaia was doomed to die as reality came undone around her, and for all she knew Ryne had already perished long before her.

So much for taking over the Bookman’s Shelves now that Urianger had vacated the premise and the books that were not already at the Crystarium donated to the Cabinet of Curiosity and living there together until their time came.

“Paragons of Darkness are balanced out by Warriors of Light. Naturally, an Oracle of Light would have her equal in an Oracle of Darkness—although by the end, most would have called her a Witch of Darkness. I was… am Ryne, the Oracle of Light. Gaia was the Oracle of Darkness, and while we started as opponents we wound up… allies. Friends. She saved me just as I saved her, and after the Scions returned to the Source she was… my new family. My new home. And while Elidibus exploited her inexplicable shroud of darkness to start rumours that the Warrior of Darkness and the Oracle of Light were perhaps not the selfless heroes the people thought we were, Gaia swore that even should the world turn against us, she would be there with us as our ally until the very end.” 

Hythlodaeus nodded, his usual smile back—but this time, Ryne had a feeling it was genuine. “I see. She sounds like quite a force of nature to behold.” 

Gaia and the Seer shared some personality traits, not that Ryne was going to admit that out loud. They both had this certain air of simply not caring about what others thought of them about them, something that was incredibly charming once one saw beyond that. Gaia was loud and proud, fully aware that she was often the centre of attention. And while she revelled in that attention, she always made it clear that her true affections were reserved for one person only. 

Very much like the Unsundered who closed his eyes beside her now. “I assume you loved her?” 

“I _love_ her,” Ryne said almost indignantly. “… Somewhere, she’s got to be. Maybe she hasn’t been born on the First yet, but I know we all have counterparts on the Source. Somewhere out there is Gaia. She’s absolutely not called Gaia. She’s never going to be the same Gaia I knew, for the Oracle of Darkness was one of her kind. But I will love that Gaia just as I love her. Even if she hates me. Even if she never knows I exist. The fates and whatever deities control such meetings willing, I will find her to at least tell her that much.” 

She half expected him to start laughing and Unukalhai with him, but neither of them said a word. Hythlodaeus in fact merely nodded. 

“It is never easy to leave behind those you love, even if necessity drives you. You could just as easily have chosen to die beside her, yet here you stand—I am sure she understands.” There was a wistful, almost sad tone to his voice as he then chuckled. “She does sound like a lovely person. And she has to be, if you love her so fiercely—I am quite certain if the fates are kind, they will see you two reunited somehow.” 

“I thought you… did not believe in the fates?” 

“That I do not, but I am far from cruel enough to crush peoples’ beliefs. If you believe the fates will guide you to her, then they almost certainly will. That alone is enough for one who knows how supposed fate works. And should the lady fate need some help with delivering the message, perhaps I shall even play her messenger.” 

And with that, he almost gracefully swept himself to his feet and all but danced off back into the crowd; he likely was trying to keep attention off of her and Unukalhai. She watched him with a confused look on her face for a while until Unukalhai beside her put a hand against her arm. 

“I believe that was Unsundered for telling you that if he comes across something resembling your Gaia he will let you know. The Seer of all people ought to know how you feel from what I understand—you left Gaia behind in your abandoned doomed timeline, and he left Emet-Selch before the end of days and never returned, not even when they were amongst the sole survivors of the Sundering.” 

“… I don’t understand what he sees in Emet-Selch,” she sighed. “He is… such a nice person. Vibrant, maybe a touch too sarcastic and animated when he wants to be. Emet-Selch is so… cold.” 

A snort. “Have you ever considered that people might have thought the same about you and Gaia? Ferocious loyalty can oft be perceive as twisted dedication—and from what you just described her as, her loyalty could easily be seen as unhealthy obsession by outsiders.” 

Ryne crossed her arms and glared at him—for once he writhed ever so slightly under her stare. 

Eventually Unukalhai relented, and apologised quietly. 

Then, after another bell of watching the celebration’s guests dwindle and Hythlodaeus _still_ refusing each and every single person who tried to get him into their bedroom, Unukalhai let out a sigh. 

“I doubt I will be of much use—but rather than say it in roundabout ways… should I come across someone resembling this Gaia, I will let you know. As for what he sees in Emet-Selch, I am afraid that this is something only two people in this world are privy to. Himself, and Emet-Selch. And from what it sounds like, they certainly parted with many things left unsaid.” 

She almost felt bad when she looked back at the thinning crowd and saw Hythlodaeus laugh at something some adventurer and Goblin said. This time she was sure the smile and laugh were fake. 

And she understood, partially at least, what made him act the way he did now. This was a hollow in her heart that would never truly fill again—after all, Gaia and her home timeline were all but lost to her forever now. 


	59. ACT VIII: I Spy With My Missing Eye, Part 3

This Ishgard, somehow, was stranger than the one they had left behind. The change in their lost one had been gradual, not without horrendous bumps in the road, and it would take generations before a dragon flying above the city would truly be seen as a normal, everyday occurrence. The younger ones were the ones that were happiest about this change, the almost never-ending curiosity of young ones universal no matter the species. And the Firmament was truly turning into a place where man and dragon lived together while the rest of the city still struggled to truly arrive at the conclusion that the peace they all thought impossible had been achieved in their very lifetime and that their children would not have to die in a war not of their making. 

By comparison, there was still much apprehension in the air—yet somehow there were dragons circling the skies whenever Ysayle arrived for discussion. The gesture of returning Nidhogg’s eye to dragonkind had caused an uproar amongst them, Midgardsormr noted. While naught would truly break through to Hraesvelgr’s broken and frozen heart other than time perhaps, he had stirred and even left the Churning Mists to see whether he was imagining a final shred of his brother’s energy returning to Mourn now that he had truly passed.

“I doth believe that Nidhogg now lieth beside Ratatoskr, where he belongs.” His voice was almost heartbreakingly dull, and Meteor turned to look at him. “Would that the same could be said of Tiamat and Bahamut.”

Lahabrea had stayed away from the chained dragon back in Azys Lla, joined by Emet-Selch. Meteor had noted the sudden change amongst the Unsundered—as if their lost conscience had returned to them with a vengeance. Yet they acted as if nothing had changed.

The beat of wings above them made both of them look up—a handful hatchlings of some sort, excitedly fluttering about. Dragons that young could only mean one thing, and Meteor turned their head around to grin at the approaching Ysayle. Midgardsormr, meanwhile, departed as quietly and suddenly as ever.

Iceheart, in turn, shot them one of her brilliant smiles. “Good to see you, Warrior of Light.”

“Likewise, Lady Ysayle.” They turned back to look up at the dragonets bouncing around near the Skysteel Manufactory. The machinists-in-training all seemed some degree of delighted, and even the head of the manufactory managed to crack a small smile of some sort. Undoubtedly, that took a lot of effort—the Haillenartes were a guarded family when it came to their emotions, but more or less all of them still somehow felt the sting of losing their brother. Even Laniaitte, who claimed that she had better things to do than gather once a year and mourn him when he would have wanted all of them to forge on and do what they thought was right, just as he had done. Ysayle blinked as she watched that highborn crack his small smile and then vanishing back around a corner to get his instructors out and ready for whatever training session they were about to have.

“It feels surreal to have dragons inside the city without causing an immediate panic,” they said to break the silence.

“We have your efforts to thank for that, believe it or not,” Ysayle shot back immediately with a grin on her face. The only time they had ever seen her this relaxed and happy even was right before they had met with Hraesvelgr, during that one night beside a campfire. “Mostly. The Lord Commander and Azure Dragoon’s gestures certainly sped it up—both for man _and_ dragon. Many still hesitate, but between the both of us: one of these dragonets hails from Nidhogg’s brood.”

“Huh.” Even knowing that, it was impossible to tell which one it was. Not a single one of these little ones lacked the energy of the others, and even the Ishgardians who passed by, once the first moment of surprise about dragons in the middle of the city had passed, all sort of smiled or rolled their eyes in ways that told others that this was precisely how children behaved.

This Ishgard was strange indeed. Yet at the same time they could not entirely say that they disliked it. The differences were staggering at times, yes, but it was the change that Ysayle _and_ Aymeric craved rather than simply the change that Aymeric desired. Ysayle, misguided as her belief that she was Shiva reincarnated had been, managed to somehow be a reflection of what the Saint had done. Shiva and Ysayle both sought to unite man and dragon, and both had somewhat succeeded… until the next rift would cause the two to drift apart again. Meteor genuinely hoped that this time it was not as tragic as Ratatoskr’s death and Nidhogg’s rightful quest for vengeance had been.

After standing there and watching the dragonets for a bit longer, they eventually let out a sigh and shook their head. Thinking of Nidhogg for too long only ever brought them to the still inexplicably gone Eye. “Has anything changed?” 

Ysayle shook her head as well; by now she knew what their grim expression meant. “I am afraid not. Countless of my fellows and even several dragons are on the lookout; even some directly of Hraesvelgr’s brood, but none can sense the aether of the missing Eye. They would all want to truly, fully lay Nidhogg to rest but we simply cannot find a trace of it.” 

They let out a small curse. “That about sums up our side of the search between following clues on the Scions’ whereabouts.”

“And you are quite certain that your shady companions have not been up to anything… unsavoury?”

Meteor tilted their head to the side and hummed. “I do appreciate your doubts about this alliance, truly I do, but none of them have moved without supervision lately. Even so, at least one dragon somewhere would have caught but a trace of Nidhogg lingering on my, ah, shady companions.”

Ysayle nodded, but she certainly did not seem all that convinced.

* * *

An upside of fighting far from civilisation in a faked attempt to find the Antecedent was that they could fight without having to hold back. Vidofnir’s request had come hesitantly and was delivered through a Moogle of all creatures in this part of Hydaelyn, but regardless the three of them decided to descend down into the magma caverns of Mourn to get rid of the pest infesting it. So that those that had passed could once more rest in silence, Elidibus had said in an attempt to keep his disguise complete. 

Down here where there were no people who would recognise his magic as surreal and unearthly, Lahabrea quite literally let loose—as loose as someone just as immobile as a thaumaturge or a Black Mage could let in any case. They barely even felt the heat of Mourn as they descended further and further all thanks to the immaculately glittering cloud of aether that followed them around. Elidibus’ mouth was a thin line after they effortlessly dispatched yet another massive creature standing in their way as he watched a cut on Meteor’s face knit itself together.

“You seem displeased, Emissary,” they said with a shrug. While they did not trust these Ascians further than they could throw them, there was undeniably some sort of team dynamic that needed to be acknowledged by this point—which unfortunately included having to ask peoples’ opinions.

Elidibus, as ever, continued playing the completely neutral instance. If their question annoyed him, he certainly did not show any sign of general annoyance and unfortunately he seemed to have finally mastered keeping his ears and the tail under control when it came to keeping his emotions guarded. All he did was put a hand on his chin and hum as he watched Lahabrea forge onwards, audibly arguing with Minfilia about something or other in regards to aetheric balance.

“Displeased? No, far from it. ‘Baffled’ would perhaps be a better word to use.”

Meteor crossed their arms. “Lahabrea, I presume?”

“Mhm.” Elidibus closed his eyes. “I know not precisely how much knowledge you have gained from Emet-Selch’s recreated Amaurot and the remnants of Anamnesis Anyder. I am not even asking for it. But I need you to understand one thing in particular about Lahabrea: he changed rather irreversibly following his investigation into the creatures born during calamity. Or so we believed.”

Meteor rolled their eyes. “Contrary to popular Ascian belief, duty does not necessarily mean misery.” 

“You know as well as I do that you have your Mother to thank for the misery aspect amidst our duty. Is there aught else that you would like to ask so you can yank your little chain and rattle it in my face as the better choice, or are you done?” 

They narrowed their eyes, but shrugged with their arms still crossed. “Yes, but I reckon we ought to start following the Speaker lest he turns his awful hunger for aether onto us.”

“A fair observation.” Without adding anything else, Elidibus started walking and Meteor followed suit.

Down here, the air became chokingly hot and nearly unbearable. But in his charge ahead—they could see that Lahabrea was further down near where a giant hulking scorpion awaited them smiting some foolish creature or seven—the Speaker had left behind pockets of swirling aether that let them breathe as if it was still warm but less choking summer air. Knowing that all this aether had been ripped out of once living creatures did not make it easier to breathe, of course. Beast or no, they were still living beings of some sort. Meteor watched the aether behind them glitter and disperse as Lahabrea further down waved his hand slightly.

“I know more than enough about phantomology and sorcery by now, but something quite tells me that you have been holding back.” 

Elidibus’ shoulders tensed for a moment as they slowly descended down to catch up with Lahabrea.

“You thoroughly humiliated all of us back in the Crystarium, yet nowadays it seems as if but the slightest brush will make you topple over. _Especially_ since we managed to lure in the Seer. Frankly, all three of you Unsundered Ascians look like frail little wallflowers next to him due to all of you being mostly mages of some sort, but still. Amongst the frail, you stand out.” 

The Ascian in white sighed and his tense shoulders slumped. “Lahabrea drains the aether out of living beings and his full might is a field of corpses none but him would be comfortable crossing. Emet-Selch directly cuts into the Lifestream’s reservoirs, which you know if he drinks too deep of turns him into something screaming with the voices of the dead. Gerun, were he capable of controlling it, would likely be able to draw from any source; primarily the Lifestream like Emet-Selch; and focus it into protective measures like your shields of darkness which would in fact blow up the way he does whenever he attempts using magic of any sort. Were I to bring my full might to bear, we would have another Burn on our hands, for my energy source is the ambient, unliving aether around us.” He clenched and unclenched his fists. “Once upon a time, it was but a flick of the wrist to return as much as was taken. No longer—your Mother and Her grasp on this world make keeping the balance an impossibility beyond your comprehension.” 

“Elaborate?” 

He sneered as he stepped over the steaming corpse of a crab that had been left in the way. “Anything the dark touches is tainted, Warrior of Light. You are, as a matter of fact. Any and all aether we use is considered impure and must needs be cleansed by Her Herself. Why do you think She has grown so weak and laments the overwhelming strength of darkness? Our numbers have not changed, not once. After all, as Emet-Selch doubtlessly elaborated, we but ascend those who previously held the position—whether they be given a title befitting a member of the Convocation of Thir… Fourteen, or one of their staunchest supporters from their bureaus.”

Distantly, they remembered the way the Word of the Mother had spoken upon their encounter following their descent through the Antitower. How the dark had been overwhelming in many regards, and that Zodiark had grown too hungry, too overwhelming, and that his countless minions would stop at nothing. Of course the Ascians seemed to number countless, but the way Elidibus talked… it sounded as if there most certainly was a finite amount of them.

But it seemed as if Elidibus was through with this topic, drawing his ears back and staring down to where Lahabrea had been not too long ago. Meteor traced his line of sight, only to find that naught but the very corpses that the Emissary had mentioned earlier remained.

“It would be wiser if we left the conversation as is—recovered though he is and not held back by the stifling disguise of pretending to be a mortal, I would not see Lahabrea get ahead of himself.”

“Wait, just one more thing. You could create another Burn if you so wished?”

There was an annoyed flick of a tail that accompanied the low grumble that escaped Elidibus now. “I fail to see how that is relevant, Warrior of Light. But yes.”

Meteor kicked a rock down into a bubbling pit of lava. “Then why have you not done so already to defeat us in the past? You fought us fair and… square…?”

The Emissary turned his head slightly with a crooked grin of sorts. “Ambient aether so very rarely churns and twists. One but has to siphon from where your limited mortal awareness does not reach to suddenly become overwhelmingly strong by comparison. In other words, I mayhap cheated in your eyes by hooking my claws into the aether of buildings rather than the immediate surroundings.”

“Unbelievable.”

That sigh earned them a wide grin, as if the Emissary meant to say that this was precisely his job description. Or it had at least been his intention from the very beginning.

* * *

They knew countless mages, many of whom were thaumaturges in the end. Some of their more fond memories were from the Waking Sands and the Rising Stones where the Scions all sat around and joked the nights away in celebration—often coming back around to their chosen professions and weapons. How Tataru was the one who wielded the most important and most deadly weapon of all, her sharp wit. How Arenvald’s bladework had improved over the last absence of theirs, or Yugiri teaching them a few tricks of the shinobi. But most importantly they always remembered the mages talking about their profession.

Meteor could shamelessly admit they were not made to be a mage. One of their sisters, the eldest, had always had a knack for the smaller conjury spells, usually spending her time fixing up small injuries that her younger siblings accumulated over the duration of a week at the end. Y’shtola and Krile healed on a higher skill level than that, but even the smallest basics of their elaborate arts came back to their sister hunching over them with her calm smile and telling them to be a little more careful the next time.

By comparison, the arcanima-based and the thaumaturgy-based arts were a lot more volatile. Alphinaud every so often let out an almost wistful sigh and said that he did not quite enjoy weaving spells to hurt—that there was a fundamental difference between the soothing and the injuring ones even for the arcanists among them, which earned him a solemn nod from Y’shtola and Krile. But the volatile also had its right to exist, and once Alisaie officially rejoined the Scions the conversations on offensive magic became livelier than ever. After all, the red combined the strength of the black and the white. And while Red Mages were thought to have died out when Ala Mhigo fell, the thaumaturges and conjurers of the Scions both seemed to all but jump onto the chance to speak to one. 

As Alisaie explained it, there was a fundamental difference between the astral and the umbral to a degree that really only mages understood, most of all thaumaturges. Conjurers could ask the very earth to turn against their enemies, made the water roil in defiance despite its passiveness, and if all else failed they could make the winds turn. Thaumaturges in comparison dug into the polar opposites of ice and lightning, the most passive and the most active, while their usual go-to was the also active fire. Arcanima wove a little bit of everything together but in a way that turned the elements to poisonous substances or creatures that bent to their will.

From as much as the Ascians had tried to explain—not very much, but enough to have a vague grasp—they understood the differences between creation magicks and the very spells that each and every single person at the very least knew about on the Source and the Shards both. Thaumaturgy came the closest to what Elidibus did, the so-called siphoners and the mages of mainly Ul’dah borrowing their energy from their surroundings rather than anything else. The sheer glacial difference between the devastation a single mage could cause notwithstanding, of course. The way conjurers had to appease the spirits around them sounded faintly reminiscent of how Emet-Selch as a sorcerer borrowed from the Lifestream, the exception being that conjurers would drop dead if they did wrong whereas Emet-Selch’s appearance changed to show how deep with the dead he had descended. The more powerful spells he wove, the more absurdly undead his appearance became.

Going by that, arcanima might have been the closest equivalent to a phantomologist. But the way Lahabrea cast his spells… was more what Alisaie described as horrendous use of red magic that she had come across in her training. The main difference there being that Lahabrea did not have to wait for his opponent to be injured to use their very aether against them.

Sohm Al’s lowest point did not harbour a temple dedicated to protect auspices. There would be no Soroban greeting them awkwardly amidst the auspices, there was no glittering water. No, it was a crackling, blubbering pit of fire, too hot almost to properly enter even with Midgardsormr offering them some protection with a whisper. After all, if their body burnt to a crisp there was no recovering it.

It was the first crackle behind them that made them realise how _lucky_ they had been that Lahabrea had been too exhausted to bring his full might to bear. Emet-Selch and Elidibus both had said that while Lahabrea was akin to a flame and used them the most as he grew weaker, it was not always what he had fallen back to first. No, at the height of his power the aether bent to him was like a strike of lightning—swift, painful, so absurdly active that it seemed almost bizarre to think of him as anything but a creator of monstrous proportions. Not something he flaunted before the Sundering, something that he was almost _ashamed_ of.

Elidibus finally fought properly, far from prying mortal eyes. Suddenly his clumsy dodging despite the Echo had an explanation; he propelled himself back and forth with short bursts of aether rather than relying on his own body to dodge. Several frustrated scorpions were chasing the Ascian in a Miqo’te body around, unable to catch up while he pelted them with what looked hundreds, thousands of Ruin spells.

It left the big one to Meteor and Lahabrea—the meat shield in a sense and the immobile mage.

They had battered the thing around for a while to see whether Lahabrea was going to drain it of its life force—but as they watched Elidibus’ little game, it became clear that Lahabrea was pulling the aether out of these poor bastards instead.

It was the crackle that scared them. There were still about a dozen damned scorpions chasing Elidibus about, the one in front of them was poised to ram their dwindling solid ground once more to shake the looser plates so they would sink under the boiling magma around them, and they could not turn to look at their supposed ally. After all, if the scorpion decided to rush past them at the last possible moment to attack the very person they were looking at, they would earn themself a lecture they did not particularly want to have.

For a few heartbeats, all they heard was the low hissing of the scorpions that Elidibus finally decided to sweep aside and into the lava.

Then silence.

Then another crackle that sounded like a whipcrack followed by a screech. Finally they decided to turn their head enough to see what Lahabrea had been doing—and promptly froze with their eyes wide.

As Arenvald explained it, he and Fordola had worked together with the Flames’ summoners on a few occasions. Summoning was an art that many thought lost, something that even G’raha had said that he had not expected to be revived. But there were no masters standing above the rest of them, despite the fact that Y’shtola’s sister had unearthed more than one technique that was overwhelmingly powerful. Dreadwyrm Trance she called it on the one occasion that they had walked into the sisters talking, and the Miqo’te had hung her head with a sigh. If only there were someone strong enough to try learning these techniques—for there was limitless potential for a summoner.

Meteor watched as, once the crackling subsided, the bird unfolded its wings. Despite the already overwhelming heat around them they _felt_ a blast of even hotter air emanating from that creature, but they were more mesmerised by how every single feather on it glimmered and shimmered. Countless hues of gold, all glimmering as if the creature were made of actual gold. Yet its eyes, its beak, and its feet were shockingly dark—as if burnt to a crisp and risen from the depths of hell itself. Coal, a moment away from igniting again. As it moved, its shimmering plumage reflected the deep red and brown of its surroundings, turning the gilded feathers to shining copper. Even having seen the Primal risen from this very creature’s memory, Louisoix’s attempt at becoming this fabled bird of rebirth to topple a Primal born to bring naught but death paled in comparison to Lahabrea’s creation.

All those pockets of aether Lahabrea had left behind might not have been for easier breathing in the end. The sheer amount of writhing, living aether that coiled and uncoiled and ignited in front of them was so unbelievably dense that even Meteor felt it—and Meteor was far from sensitive to stupid amounts of aether. Even Midgardsormr’s presence beside them stilled in what might have been awe for a breath.

Then a shriek rattled Sohm Al’s lowest point. It shook, tremendously and overwhelmingly, as Lahabrea’s phoenix rose slightly. All thanks to their battle experience and having listened to countless mages talk about their spells, Meteor unfroze and dove out of the way. Blindly they dove towards the only thing that was not gold, brown or bright red in this place—Elidibus in his white robes. Much to their surprise, the Ascian did not hesitate in the slightest to shove himself between them and the blast of aether that Lahabrea’s creation show forward with a bellow. The ground shook beneath their feet as blinding-hot, searing and nearly white flame incinerated their opponent in less than a blink of an eye.

“Seven hells,” they whispered.

Elidibus in front of them snorted. “Quite literally so.”

It was utterly bizarre to see the bird then land, folding its glimmering wings and bending its head down as Lahabrea stepped forwards. They knew that many a Carbuncle quite enjoyed receiving a pat or a treat of some sort; not Alphinaud’s seeing as it was a bizarrely proud creature, but Urianger’s Carbuncle in particular behaved like a common house cat outside of combat. Egis much like Emet-Selch’s Moogle miscreation often acted similar, having been born from the same formulas but with adjustments to fit Primal aether. But somehow it was more than odd to watch this ominously breathtaking bird that seemed more a harbinger of death and flame than anything else, to calmly shove its beak against the raised, almost comically small by comparison hand the Ascian offered it.

The silence was broken by Elidibus starting to clap. Bird and creator both turned their heads towards the Emissary and Meteor, and they were suddenly painfully aware that they were alone with two of their sworn enemies. If Lahabrea and Elidibus decided to turn against them here and now there was precious little outside hoping that the darkest of nights could protect them from this creature sitting there like an oversized pet dodo beside its creator. And worse perhaps was the fact that they would have to leave Minfilia behind, given that she was still technically in Lahabrea’s hands.

“And here I had thought I would never have the pleasure of seeing you create again,” Elidibus said and looked up at the phoenix approvingly. “I must say, she came out as dazzling as ever.” 

Now that it—she?—had settled, Meteor noticed that the flames had either dimmed or gone out entirely. The gilded, glimmering look to the Phoenix remained but its eyes no longer looked like literal hellstone that someone had chiselled out and crudely shoved into this bird’s face. Indeed, while its beak and legs were a deep, deep black it seemed as if they had a texture to it that made it look like charcoal. And while its eyes were dark indeed, there did not seem to be a malicious glint to it; in fact it seemed to emanate a calmness that Meteor only knew from professional healers that usually dealt with children. With the fire gone around its wings, they saw that the feathers ended in a dark, almost charred-looking colour that appeared to be some sort of reddish gold. While the Primal Phoenix had by no means been an easy opponent or ugly to behold, there was something bafflingly breathtaking about this absurd creature dyed in the colours of metals they had no names for other than the almost glib and ugly-sounding gold. 

Meteor was not a person to freeze in fear. Their siblings had usually called for them whenever something spooked them, from their gentle oldest sister to the crybaby youngest brother, they all relied on them to go into the dark cabinets and what not to check if there truly was a Kobold waiting for them to enter to eat them. But when this bird shifted, the rustle of its feathers sounding like a gently crackling campfire in a silent, starry night, and turned its head to stare them down, Meteor felt the blood freeze in their veins. But they could not look away from the bird that was clearly sizing them up. 

To them, the click of its beak sounded like a bloody gunshot. While they did not mean to flinch backwards so harshly they had essentially no control over it—for the first time in ages they felt sort of lost. 

It was like standing in opposition to Ifrit for the first time all over again, and dimly they recalled that Ifrit as a Primal had also been born from Lahabrea seeking to undermine Hydaelyn. 

Heavens, now they understood why they had been lucky to avoid Lahabrea at the height of his powers. Any of them, really. 

“Worry not,” the Ascian said and sounded almost entirely wrong to their ears. Hells, they had not thought a voice that soft to ever come from Lahabrea to begin with. “She is a soulless creation at the end of the day. Unless you suddenly decide to turn me into fancy little flesh ribbons, she will not turn on you, Warrior of Light.” 

Those words finally unfroze their blood and they shook their head. Bird and creator both tilted theirs slightly in turn, and they noticed that Elidibus made no effort to hide his amusement and instead swished his tail from side to side. 

“This is… absurd,” Meteor eventually choked out and gestured. “If you were capable to do this all along, how come the only ones that ever brought a modicum of their power against me were Elidibus and Emet-Selch?” 

“If I may,” a familiar voice gently spoke up after being surprisingly quiet for ages and Lahabrea reached into a satchel he carried about to retrieve the crystal from it and hold it out, “while I do not understand much of combat, least of all how mages fight in detail, I believe that mental deterioration might have… factored into this.” 

“Factors,” Elidibus replied to Minfilia and turned to the bird instead. “Those claws and the sharp beak were not part of the original design, and the colours are dimmer than before. Beautiful she is, but she is not hale and whole. Though such specifics are lost on you mortals, naturally. How do I put this… you know of the Nymian Marine? How the so-called Scholars of Nym fought alongside what the Source calls faeries? Imagine one such faerie, and replace its healing properties with knives. Her flames were not supposed to incinerate even the very aether of creatures—she was supposed to heal.” 

Lahabrea’s outstretched hand shook slightly and he flexed the other before putting it against the bird’s body. 

“What I do with my concept is none of your concern, Emissary,” he hissed. “It is not as if she will be brought out in inhabited places or where mages frequent. The situation called for a swift end to a fight that could have seen us and the opponent incinerated, so I merely took over the incineration process.” 

And with that, the bird chirped gently and then burst into flames beside the Ascian. Meteor took a surprised step backwards and Minfilia let out a yelp—but this time, there was no heat emanating from the dim flames that devoured the creation. It unravelled into countless plumes of fire that consumed themselves quietly; a stark contrast to how it had burst forth into being with a deafening crack. 

“We ought to report to Vidofnir and carry on,” Lahabrea snarled before tossing Meteor the gem that held Minfilia’s soul. Without adding anything else, he whipped around and stalked off towards the long, long ascent back to the Churning Mists. 

Elidibus shrugged and followed, leaving Meteor and Minfilia to bring up the rear. 

Only once the Ascians were out of their immediate earshot but not out of their sight did Meteor raise the crystal a little. “How are you, Antecedent?” 

They half expected Minfilia to ignore them or to get mad—but all they received was a surprisingly soft, almost fond laugh. “Had I known that letting you and your friends into the Scions would lead to this absurd situation, I would have sent you straight back to the hells you crawled out from. Yet at the same time I cannot say I am unhappy about having the very hell denizens that I swore to work against by my side—I know for certain that I would not be here were it not for you and your absurd alliance. So pray excuse me if I cannot say that I am well, but also cannot confirm that I am unwell either.” 

They nodded, which earned them a thoughtful hum. 

“Although I must admit, I cannot deny that you are committed to your cause—and I do believe that this cause is… salvation, in one form or another. But the definition is where you and your companions stray.” 

Meteor nodded. “That I am aware of, but it is good to hear you, too, made this observation.” 

“May I ask you whether this evil that saw you and an Ascian work together to recruit more Ascians to your cause is truly so great as to warrant… going against our Mother’s gifts like this?” 

For a moment, Meteor quietly looked on ahead. Elidibus had caught up to Lahabrea and the Ascians were having a conversation of some sorts about aetheric density of volcanoes such as this one. The sort to not erupt without intense aggravation, for even as active as it was as an element, fire was not volatile unless out of control. After all it consumed itself ere long. 

Much as Lahabrea had in the end. 

“Evil or not, the fact that both we and the remaining Ascian were unable to do aught but stare in horror at the scene unfolding before us ought to tell you more than enough about its power levels. A Calamity like the Seventh would be a Hingan fireworks display by comparison.” 

A low hum of either confusion or agreement. Minfilia was hard to read without a face—much like Elidibus, she would have made an excellent Emissary and neutral party had she gotten her passion under control. The Minfilia they had gotten to know had never gotten the chance to grow to such a position. Ryne had no desire to have such a position in the end, preferring to show what she thought over brooding endlessly and treading in polite circles around another party. 

“… I suppose to begin this dance anew, we had to see its final steps first, if that makes sense. The Emissary and I had our dance as one by one the other dancers fell either to the sidelines or vanished entirely until we were left and then the finale was interrupted. We… merely had the chance to turn back to the beginning of the dance and see that the important dancers do not leave the floor until said interruption occurs.” 

“… And those dancers include the likes of Lahabrea?” 

Meteor shook their head. “You as well. The Lady Iceheart of the heretics. There are so many who left the dancefloor pre-emptively either willingly or unwillingly. I would see that they finish their dance this time around. Which… fortunately or unfortunately includes the likes of Lahabrea.” 

They started jogging after the Ascians after Lahabrea barked down at them to hurry it up already. The air grew cooler and cooler as they ascended, even seeing a dragon fly through the distant hazy clouds once they emerged from the caves that had taken them all the way down into the depths of the volcano. 

“Warrior of Light?” 

“Antecedent?” 

“Would… would you be so kind as to explain to me again how you and yours came to possess bodies?” 

“Would you wish to join us?” 

She breathed out shakily. “Not in combat, no. Your Oracle of Light is a formidable fighter, one I cannot hope to copy. But I would… like to be rid of this existence where all I can do is watch and question.” 

They nodded. “Gladly so, Antecedent.” 

A pause. 

“Minfilia. Please, I beg you, call me Minfilia again.” 

* * *

It wasn’t until Krile claimed she had an idea on how to find Minfilia that they acted. Inside the Antitower no one truly could trace them, and once far enough in Meteor and Elidibus departed to go fetch Minfilia and her new vessel. 

Once they had retrieved her they began making their way back towards the entrance that Matoya had opened for them, and Minfilia sluggishly requested a moment to breathe properly. 

“I hadn’t… noticed it before but now that I think about it… you are nowhere near as sneaky about it as you think you are,” she said after she messed with her new necklace. “I had thought it odd when you joined and never spent another moment thinking about it, but… adventurers with actual accessories that are eerily similar in many regards _except_ for the colours of their gemstones?” 

Hers was a brilliant white, like pure auracite—the same way that Unukalhai, Meteor and Ryne’s crystals looked. Elidibus, Lahabrea and Emet-Selch in comparison had deep violet ones. The Exarch completely lacked any such accessory but a good chunk of his body was blue crystal. And Hythlodaeus… now that they thought about it, they had not exactly gotten a good look at his crystal but they presumed that it was colourless due to his unique situation. 

“Then again… we did miss the obvious on Thancred as well.” 

Lahabrea sneered. “The details tend to escape you mortals, and that makes you easily exploitable. Had I chosen the flowery-speaking buffoon instead I would have immediately been suspicious; the philandering sleaze on the other hand may as well have received the tacky little accessory from another one of his conquests.” 

“… The fact that you spent enough time watching us to figure as much out is astounding.” 

Meteor shook their head and crossed their arms. “It is not as if Thancred is the most sneaky person around. In fact, were I to scout out a weakness I would go after him. Before… before any of the banquet, of course.” 

“… Ah.” 

“But anyway. We all know our roles once we leave?” 

The Ascians both sighed and nodded almost simultaneously, and Minfilia crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow as if to accuse Meteor of not knowing themself and asking for help with remembering. They nodded at her with a small smile and then closed their eyes. 

“If you find anything on the missing Eye—” 

“I am to report this immediately to prevent further disaster, yes. Worry not. But know that my earlier threat still stands—the moment I assume anything about your little alliance is off, the Scions will hear from me just what exactly is going on.” 

“Understood. Now then, Antecedent, Speaker, Emissary—it is high time we returned to our companions waiting alongside Master Matoya, would you not agree?” 


	60. ACT VIII: I Spy With My Missing Eye, Part 4

The bird was, much like its owner, surprisingly active and most certainly violent without any provocation. Mortals, from owner to bird, were all cut from the same, needlessly violent cloth. So very, very needlessly violent, he had lamented earlier and received naught but a vague ear flick into his direction. His patience was… running short, unsurprisingly. And this infernal avian was testing him beyond his limits, all while the mortal who had been given control of the damned thing did nothing and instead investigated yet another pointless terminal. 

“Get the damn bird under control!” he yelled as he tried to dodge yet another jumping kick delivered towards his head. While dying to such a creature would at worst diminish his dignity into negative space in a place where no Spoken lived, he was not going to give the Chocobo or the Crystal Exarch the satisfaction of letting himself be clawed to death.

“Mhm. And whatever will you do, Architect, if I will make no effort to control the bird? Assuming that he, of course, listens to be to begin with.” Oh, the Exarch clearly thought himself clever, but even while dodging he saw the amused twitch of his tail.

“Enjoy scouring this place on your own. And enjoy explaining my absence to your fellows and my fellows—make no mistake, I can and _will_ abandon your cause at the drop of a needle.”

“Go ahead, then.” The Exarch lazily turned his head towards where Emet-Selch was still dodging the bird’s claws while it trilled excitedly. “You have not been of much help thus far, and your absence will barely be noticeable outside of Meteor’s Chocobo likely staying by my side instead of attempting to crack your bones open to feast on your innards.”

The Warrior of Light had handed the Chocobo to the Exarch as a means of transportation, seeing as the Oracle of Light’s group would likely be taking the Manacutter once they met with the Ironworks and the Warrior of Light themself had the father of dragonkind by their side. The Exarch simply lacked the means to fly about—and apparently no one quite trusted Emet-Selch to take the infuriatingly smug Allagan brat along to wherever they needed to go. Therefore they were stuck with his bloodthirsty, oversized piece of poultry that seemed to have made it its miserable life’s mission to be as inconveniencing as possible.

As if that violently yellow plumage wasn’t already an affront to all things good and well on this godsforsaken sundered earth.

“You are surprisingly cruel, O Exarch,” he hissed out and narrowly escaped a lunge. That beak was deceivingly sharp—who right in their mind trained their supposedly calm pet into a murder machine except for bloody Eorzeans!? No one, he wanted to scream, no one needed a murderous bird that was much better off being used as transportation except for those damned Eorzeans and their nonsensically violent ways.

Then again, a small voice whispered, wasn’t Eorzea the way it was through their manipulation?

“I do believe if you stop further aggravating him by playing into his mindless game he will leave you alone,” eventually came the half-chuckled words from the Exarch while he turned to fiddle with another machine. “Now, what does this do? Emet-Selch?”

He hissed out an insult in Amaurotine, which the bird replied to with another lunge-kick and an amused trill of some sort. “You call this a _game?”_

“Shower is a fairly young, active bird, yes. The ones trained in combat—”

“Shower.”

Emet-Selch stopped dead. The bird bumped into him, its excited trilling suddenly dying down and turning into an almost apologetic warbling as it shoved its head against his arm. It really appeared as if the damned creature had been overexcited and merely been trying to get a reaction out of him. Sort of like this bizarre children’s toy from way back when Hythlodaeus had not accepted any sort of title and instead been the overseer of the Bureau of the Architect. 

“You mean to tell me this infernal hellbeast,” he said deadpan, and the infernal hellbeast warbled some more and gently nudged him, “is called _Shower.”_

“… It is a joke, Emet-Selch. Have you _ever_ heard of ‘puns’? Because his name is one—his owner is called Meteor, the bird is called Shower. A meteor shower, if you will.”

“This bloody bird with claws sharp enough to cleanly sever flesh and a beak horrendously hard enough to shatter stone… is called Shower.”

“I have in fact met someone who named their Amaro after an entire roast dodo dinner on the First. Not to mention several other, much less savoury words, names and even entire phrases mangled together into Fae for a rather colourful insult that none but people who have to admit they speak Fae understand and that the actual Fae think hilarious. This name is fairly innocent by comparison. Now, if you would not mind—what purpose does this terminal serve?”

Emet-Selch glared at the Chocobo. The Chocobo stared back at him and trilled softly, and he let out a long, long sigh.

“Irrelevant to our search, in any case. We are not here for Allagan summoners. Now if you would excuse me—”

Finally the Exarch let out a low whistle, and the Chocobo let out an excited noise before hopping over to him. “Wherever you plan on going, don’t. I will unfortunately require your assistance within the Aetherochemical Research Facility.”

* * *

For all the order that Allag normally displayed, Azys Lla was a mess. It was to be expected, seeing as it was more ambitious than even the Crystal Tower and had very nearly succeeded to be just that. A floating continent made entirely to further the war Allag had started, and once the world was conquered it was to be their little playground of grandeur. Nothing more impressive than the genetical manipulations that had made their victory so overwhelming, all powered by the energies of the Primals that their subjugated countries had summoned in despair. And last but not least, one of the great wyrms on display, perhaps even soon to be joined by the very father of dragonkind had all gone according to the Allagans.

Such things rarely ever happened once the empires of the past set their eyes upon them, yet while the continent below had been devastated by the Calamity that shook the earth to its very core, Azys Lla continued existing far, far from prying eyes. And somewhere along the way, a single drop of royal blood had persevered long enough to wind up here.

For someone who had mostly taught himself how to handle Allagan machinery, the Exarch certainly did not make too many grave mistakes.

Unfortunately for him, many details were written in ciphers or plain other languages of nations that Allag had conquered.

Such as the display the Exarch had been poking at for the better part of a bell, all while Emet-Selch stared out into the distance with narrowed eyes. The imperial warship was missing from the Quadrant it had been anchored at, as if Lahabrea’s little lightshow and the maze they had set up in the facility had driven the normally so incredibly stubborn van Hydrus to retreat prematurely.

Whatever he could say about Varis—little good and less pleasant things for the most part—he had to admit that the useless man had his allies that believed in him and his nonsense in ways that either were brought about by genius manipulation or disgusting sincerity. And knowing Varis especially in regards to van Hydrus, it was likely the latter.

“… Emet-Selch. Would you mind coming over here and making sure I am not misreading this display, please?”

He rolled his eyes and walked on over; the last thing he needed right now was another pointless argument.

At first it looked like every other bloody Allagan display; needless amounts of numbers and ridiculous amounts of superfluous information that no one but the trained staff understood properly. Energy level readings that paled in comparison to the energy readings that Akademia Anyder itself put out whenever the brightest minds of Amaurot came together to think about another source of energy they could create. Mentions of some sort of empty pods somewhere, a notification that the doors had been messed with such and so many turns of the sun ago that it could only have been them leading van Hydrus on a wild Chocobo chase, some mentions of such and so many security and other nodes going offline after a ridiculous amount of mortal lifetimes in service to a long-dead empire, tomestones here and there missing, an energy reading at the Triad Control, more empty stasis pods, and—

“… The empty stasis pods and the energy readings from the innermost reaches of the facility. Is that what you thought you were misreading?”

“Ah. I was _not_ mistranslating those notifications with my crude Meracydian, then. There were no such energy readings within the facility back when we first, uh, broke and entered, and there certainly were no notifications about _empty_ stasis pods. Perhaps weakening bindings on said stasis pods, but not _empty_ ones.”

Emet-Selch crossed his arms. “The weakening bindings were deliberately installed by people seeking to overthrow Allag from within and see the Empire fall to the almighty gods and goddesses of Meracydia. Lahabrea and Igeyorhm have been ever so gently tampering with them since the Seventh Calamity, Igeyorhm mostly under the scrutinising supervision of Nabriales and Altima at times as to not repeat previous mistakes. That is beside the point. But the empty pods and the fact that our dear Legatus friend van Hydrus seems to have not only survived his unceremonious frying but also gotten out of his Allagan door-based labyrinth and subsequently departed from Azys Lla… Something or other here is off.”

“Where… how would you know that van Hydrus has departed?”

“Oh, please, has the crystal eaten away your ability to see or think?” He gestured towards the dim window he had been staring out of. “Not a trace left of the warship that beset us and that carried his legion to this very place.”

The Exarch sighed and crossed his arms. “Low insults will be getting us nowhere.”

“So sayeth the Sundered whose insistence that I did not understand his partner’s humour in naming an oversized piece of poultry something as idiotic as ‘Shower’, hear hear!”

For someone as calm and collected as the Exarch, it seemed as if Emet-Selch had finally struck a nerve with the man if the lashing tail was any indication. It were the next words that stunned Emet-Selch into complete silence. “You have been horrendously lively ever since your little adventure with the Seer. Pray tell, is there a way to get you _back to the non-lively variant?”_

A pause.

“… Uh. I… I did not mean for you to… actually shut up like that.”

Had he really been that lively?

He hadn’t really noticed it, truth be told. Of course there was this complete and utter high of triumph over Hydaelyn that he had all but ridden to oblivion. The Word of the Mother _and_ the Seer were two pieces that Hydaelyn had believed Hers by right, doubly so since the Word of the Mother very likely was a stand-in for the utterly rebellious son She had tried to temper but lost to several factors. Then there was the factor that Hythlodaeus had played along with it, had even laughed once he was able to stand once more and said that it felt a little bit like Amaurot was back and rather than being the Architect and the Seer they were two teenagers making certain to teach the younger kids how to create some truly outrageously obnoxious creatures to harass Lahabrea with.

Truth be told, he had thought that the only change that was occurring was the fact that aforementioned Lahabrea had actually recovered so much of his carelessly spent energy that he was arguing—the non-violent, entirely verbal and surprisingly constructive rather than destructive way—with the Word of the Mother as if she was a visitor to Akademia Anyder.

But… if Hythlodaeus agreed to mischief again, Lahabrea had started discussing things rather than outright dismissing everyone he deemed less informed, and even the elusive Elidibus seemed to have taken a liking to being around people once again… perhaps Emet-Selch was also affected by this nonsense. And nonsense it was; at least that was Elidibus claimed it to be and Lahabrea agreed that it was.

He furrowed his brows and leaned back over the display. Swiped at the screen to get the less important notifications away, all while the Exarch narrowed his eyes and tried to follow his movements.

Finally, after jabbing through hundreds of useless notifications and fighting off the urge to scream that he was no less dedicated to his own cause than before simply because he indulged in some mockery every once in a while, he found what he was looking for. A detailed summary of the stasis pods and their status. Or, more specifically….

“The Warring Triad appears to have been released,” he said dryly, and the Exarch drew his ears back in horror. “The energy readings appear to be from… their release and subsequent defeat. Whoever it was, they made certain to slay each and every single worshipper that was put in stasis alongside the Primals. Everything else within the facility operates as expected and within parameters, meaning that aside from that disturbance nothing has changed since our first visit here.”

“… Could van Hydrus—”

“Absolutely out of the question,” Emet-Selch immediately interrupted. “Even if, ‘twould be not much unlike what befell the so-called Company of Heroes. Countless lives lost to the unrivalled power of a Primal, and those that survived, well, subtract three quarters and have them put down due to Tempering. It would have been a logistical nightmare to record and transport all the corpses out of the facility with what little survivors would remain—and Elder Primals such as the Warring Triad are not to be compared to your darling little Primal threat of these days. The fact that not a single record here indicates more than a fight within the proper containment bays implies that someone with knowledge how to operate this place and how the Primals fought took very quick and neat care of it.”

The Exarch’s ears shot back up, a puzzled expression on his face. He scratched at the bandage covering the crystal creeping up his face and closed his red eyes. He knew what Emet-Selch was implying—but he had no idea what else the Ascian was thinking.

Only the time travellers could have possibly taken care of this business swiftly and neatly. Out of those four, the Exarch in particular was the least likely to have done so, given that while he was not prone to tempering thanks to his link with the Crystal Tower he lacked the Echo, meaning that a fight with the Warring Triad would have been anything but clean. Likewise, the determined but inexperienced still Oracle of Light would not have been able to parse combat correctly thanks to the fact that she still had not gotten used to fighting Primals rather than her so-called Sin Eaters. And Elidibus would _never_ go out of his way to deal with something as banal as Primals.

Which only really left the Warrior of Light who had a matching mysterious absence that strangely aligned with the energy readings on their belt.

And the worst thing perhaps was that this was something that was not inherent to this sundered mess of a mortal but something so rooted in Alexis’ personality that he could almost see them and Hythlodaeus sit together, books on some obscure aetherial theory and then cheerfully singing out that if there was no trouble to be found this year they were almost certainly going to create it between the two of them.

He raised a hand and pinched the bridge of his nose with a mild groan.

“There is a witness we would have to question about the missing Eye anyway, now that a sweep of the facility revealed nothing. Perhaps the Great Wyrm Tiamat can help us figure out what precisely took place here.”

* * *

There was one thing that Hydaelyn and the sundered world had over Amaurot, and it was not something that anyone would quite call a good point.

Dragonkind had arrived, crash-landed even, not long after the Sundering. Whatever conversation had taken place between Midgardsormr and Hydaelyn was lost to them—Elidibus had claimed that something or other felt odd for a while and before anyone else knew, dragonkind had all but suddenly gone from one lone dragon and his brood to several hundred all ready to spread their wings and fly away to settle this new home of theirs. Which had confirmed several things all at once. One, Hydaelyn kept Her awareness spread enough to notice whatever was going on but details likely escaped Her. Two, the Source and the Shards were suspended in a pocket within space that was not easily accessed. The Void between the shards was not the same vacuum of space from before the Sundering. Three, despite being extraterrestrial, dragonkind very quickly adapted to its new home and the rules that were in place since before the Sundering.

Of course, the fact that they were extraterrestrial added another issue to the mix: they had no idea how anything about them worked. Studying them for a while yielded just about the same information that was in circulation about dragonkind these days, with the additional footnote that Elidibus had brought in from his abandoned timeline.

A dragon’s eyes absorbed aether indiscriminately, therefore being deadlier than artificially created auracite meant to bind their vast souls. Being in the process of losing his grip on a body after a violently dissolved prime fusion had made Lahabrea susceptible to absorption with little to no resistance in that abandoned timeline. A terrifying fate; for beyond that not even Elidibus had an answer. Perhaps there was some awareness left, especially considering that through the charge of aether a shade of Nidhogg created itself and took possession of the Azure Dragoon. Had Lahabrea been stronger or had the Primal that had used him as an energy source been any slight bit more sloppy, perhaps he could have broken free. 

Truth be told, that was not why he had avoided coming face to face with this dragon in particular during their first visit to Azys Lla.

Lahabrea, too, had idled away from the reunion between father and child after several mortal lifetimes apart. And while they had remained painfully quiet the entire time, he was fairly certain that the Speaker for once in his forsaken existence since the Sundering, had thought about the consequences of his actions. While the Sundered were far from alive enough to warrant a thought about them, dragonkind in particular had not been present until the Sundering. Involving them was… involving innocents. And there was no denying that slowly but steadily the conscience they had buried at the Sundering was returning with quite a vengeance.

He said nothing as he stood slightly away from the Exarch—who in turn greeted Tiamat and held most of the conversation with her.

It wasn’t until nearly the end of it that Emet-Selch felt watched. The Exarch twitched an ear towards him and for a moment it all was still.

“The shadows of Allag hang heavy over thine very existence, crystal warrior,” she said slowly, deliberately, as if to test whether Emet-Selch was going to react or not. “’Twould be wiser of thee to learn from my folly, lest thou windest up in chains like I.”

“Ah, I fear it is much too late for that. My chains merely happen to be blue crystal.”

A slight movement, just enough to let Emet-Selch know that she was trying to point him out in particular. “Thou art braver than I, then. Or thine regret spurs thee to action rather than to seek atonement. Thine earlier question I shall answer ere you taken thine leave: ‘twas one of thine companions thou have to thank for slaying the Primals. And mine brood brother’s eye, alas, ‘twas whisked away by a creature of shade much like thine companion there.”

The Exarch turned his head, surprise on his face. Emet-Selch meanwhile was already mentally going down the list of possibilities.

Igeyorhm had known about the Eye and had known about this alliance. But her bravery was as much boon as it was curse, and therefore she had abandoned course nigh immediately to challenge Lahabrea for an answer. Elidibus had herded the rest of the Ascended around to avoid any unsavoury encounters with Gaius van Baelsar or the Warriors of Light—of the few that remained, only Pashtarot came to mind as potentially someone to carry an Eye away and leave it somewhere out of reach.

“If I may,” he spoke up, “do you happen to know _which_ of my shady companions carried off the Eye? Red mask, black mask?”

If it was a black mask, there was no chance in hell this was planned.

The dragon stared at him—what may once have been burning hatred in her eyes had long since burnt out and become an ashen look of regret. “No mask,” was her reply, “white robes.”

That was… unhelpful.

And cast a very heavy suspicion on Elidibus of all people. The very one that Emet-Selch would vote the least likely to do anything.

“… Thank you.”

And with that, the conversation came to an end. The Exarch said nothing as Emet-Selch turned around and left, waving him over and opening a portal away from Azys Lla.

* * *

“I have one question that is… largely unrelated to what you assume I am going to ask,” the Exarch eventually broke the silence as Emet-Selch furiously tore through every book the mortal had collected in his somewhat impressive for a mortal lifetime. “Namely, there was a settlement in Allag called Saronia. But recently I overheard Lahabrea mention a settlement called Saronia—” 

“….” He crossed his arms and the Exarch indeed squirmed. 

“… I admit, I may have overheard him speak in his uneasy sleep. Beside the point. But I have been wondering… was there a Saronia before the Sundering?” 

He threw another book aside with a scowl, taking note that this one looked particularly old. Likely an artefact that had made the first jump through time alongside the Exarch, and while he spared no love for the topic on that, the fact that it had survived an entire Calamity was almost a little baffling. 

Eventually, Emet-Selch sighed as he stared down another stack of books. “Yes, there was. The more Rejoinings take place, the more of you Sundered seem to subconsciously remember the old world and still elect to ignore it. Your Allagan Saronia is _nothing_ compared to the grand city that fell to unspeakable horrors before we summoned Him.” 

The Exarch muttered a small thanks and then started putting the books that Emet-Selch had shuffled around back to their previous location. It was infuriating because he _felt_ the question that weighed heavy on the Exarch’s mind. It was starting to weigh his own train of thought down as well. 

No mask. 

White robes. 

Elidibus very often acted on his own and often deliberately, but even he had to admit that perhaps the summoning of the Primal Shinryu was something that was ill-advised if they sought to prevent Zenos yae Galvus from taking power. Without a Primal at his doorstep there was a small chance that he would not seek the so-called power of the Resonant, whatever that may be. Which in turn would disable his ill-begotten powers of an Ascended and make him overall less of a problem. 

Assuming, of course, that history changed. Hythlodaeus still claimed that the end result was unchanged—which meant that Zenos still sought the power of the Resonant, and wound up awakening Zodiark and Hydaelyn through killing the Seer. 

The Emissary _knew_ that. And while he had lamented certain losses such as Igeyorhm and Nabriales, there was no doubt whatsoever that Elidibus was committed to the cause. After all, he had joined hands with these mortals who he had chosen to fight against in his original timeline. 

If nothing else, it might mean that the white robes were a distraction. 

“Only an Emissary wears white, yes?” 

There it was. There was the beginning of the question that hung so heavy around the Exarch that Emet-Selch could have thrown up laughing at how long it had taken this one to ask. 

“Assuming you believe that the dragon is without error, then yes. The only Ascian who wears white is the Emissary. Considering that we know where Elidibus has been for better or worse nearly this entire time, it is safe to assume it is someone else using his colours to bring us upon a false path. Doubly so since a dragon would have noticed the stench of Nidhogg hanging about the Emissary.” 

For a moment, the Exarch remained still and quiet, and then he put another three books back where they belonged. “I have been wondering… you four are the Convocation’s very own Unsundered. Three belonging to Zodiark, one belonging to neither. Does the cry for balance not imply that there ought to be three more Unsundered in the service of Hydaelyn?” 

He blinked several times and froze halfway through reaching for a book. 

“That would be absurd,” Emet-Selch eventually managed. “Nothing and no one stays hidden forever. We would long have found traces of such people existing.” 

The Exarch shuffled some more behind him, and Emet-Selch turned around when the Miqo’te cleared his throat. 

He had grabbed one book that Emet-Selch had deliberately passed over, seeing as it was from the First. It was from a bizarre future, from a world that would likely not experience the same history as it had had in that other future, after all. Some record on heroes from history, the historical use of the term ‘Warrior of Light’ and how it had become synonymous with villains right up until Elidibus started dispelling the association and instead saw the term return to its former heroic meaning. 

“And if those Unsundered fall under the same rules as the Sundered, minus the… well… sundered souls? Reincarnation, over and over, and a clean memory wipe due to them being different people than their predecessors?” 

“That would of course make it harder to find them for people without aethersight, but you misunderstand—an unsundered soul burns so bright compared to your sundered ones that it may very well be a giant sign with the words ‘PLEASE LOOK AT ME’ emblazoned upon them in fire pointing at those people. And while Hydaelyn certainly is idiotic, Her heart Venat certainly is not. At the very least, not idiotic enough to do such.” 

His instincts never quite proved to be incorrect: the mortal that Elidibus had dragged in alongside him unexpectedly had proven to be a fascinating one indeed. And her fellows were no less interesting—but he had to admit the mental gymnastics the Exarch was doing were _ridiculous._

“And what about Her attempt to temper the Fourteenth?” 

Emet-Selch closed his eyes with a sigh. “Mere primeval instinct. While Primals created nowadays do not require human sacrifice and can exist as mere apparitions made of aether, Zodiark and Hydaelyn both were at least given something of a soul. If but a sliver of vague attachment in such a situation exists, naturally the Primal will reach out towards its heart’s biological children. Or in other cases, will attack until the desire of its creator comes to fruition.” 

It had been a long, winded, and utterly depressing on a success scale tale that the Warrior of Light had hesitantly told. That Koboldling and its tribe’s sacrifices to see the Lord of Crags rise once more, how the summoning was hijacked by the child’s despair and the result was a blindly swinging Primal that would likely have stopped had the Koboldling’s parents been alive and had they revealed themselves in front of that little one. Admittedly, while he was intrigued by the prospect of being able to undo a Tempering, he had no intention to pursue that particular point of interest. 

“Unless it was planned—and I do believe that your Scions in your original timeline would have found evidence of such eventually within Anamnesis Anyder—I sincerely doubt that Hydaelyn could have had the foresight to create Her own version of Paragons. Even less so those that still have to play by Her rules but that could hope to undermine His servants.” 

It was the Exarch’s turn to sigh. His shoulders were drooping and he had a hilariously exhausted look about him as he twitched his tail in irritation. 

“Very well. But that still leaves us with no idea whatsoever who could have taken the Eye other than your Emissary. No one else who uses aether this drenched in dark would dress in white. But the missing mask….” 

He thought back to the Word of the Mother. How furious she had looked once Hydaelyn realised who exactly was intruding upon the Lifestream so boldly and carelessly. How her eyes had been blank, crystalline blue mirrors of light and how she had clearly mentally revolted against what her more rational—as rational as mortals could be—thoughts told her to do. And while she likely valiantly fought against it for the good of the realm, there was absolutely no denying that she was tempered, bound to Hydaelyn. There was no way a supposed mouthpiece was not tempered. 

White robes… no mask…? 

“Emet-Selch? Are you quite well? You went pale all of a sudden.” 

“How much about… Amaurotine dressing codes and what not do you know?” 

A vague shrug. 

Emet-Selch shook his head and raised a hand. The Exarch flinched as a snap echoed through the room, half-expecting something bad to happen—but all Emet-Selch did was putting them both in proper Amaurotine communal robes. With masks to match. With a wave of his hand, he swiftly summoned a mannequin that served as other example. White robes. 

Red mask. 

The Exarch scowled and raised his hands to the white mask that had been placed on his face. 

“No, leave it. It helps with the explanation. In any case, what you are wearing is the communal robes of each and every single soul of Amaurot. The white mask is to equalise the people in public—the face is something that one is not to show random strangers one might run into as well. In comparison, what I wear is what marks me as a member of the Convocation. Of course, few of us would walk around in public wearing our masks off-duty, so think of it as part of our work attire. Likewise, an Emissary dresses in white when doing their job as well.” He gestured at the mannequin, and the Exarch scowled. 

“Get to the point; your uselessly melancholic theatrics are not helping.” 

He rolled his eyes in reply, and walked on over to the mannequin. 

“Now, there are two instances where one would remove or have their mask removed. One, at home. There is no need to conceal one’s face from friends in closed quarters. Two… after death. After all, the soul that made the person that person has departed.” As if to underline this, he swiftly snatched the red mask off the mannequin. 

The Exarch shrugged, the long dark robes making him seem comically small. “Are you implying we have a dead person posing as Elidibus throwing dragon eyes into the realm at large?” 

Emet-Selch sighed. Every time he got his hopes up about a mortal… but he could lament that disappointment later. “We certainly appear to have someone who knows Amaurotine custom playing a dead Emissary walking about likely to cause mayhem.” 

The Miqo’te still appeared to not understand what was going on. 

Heavens, help him. And may Elidibus forgive him for being so blunt with something that was not Emet-Selch’s to tell. 

“Fine, let me spell it out for you. The Elidibus likely on a hilarious adventure with your beloved Warrior of Light and the Word of the Mother carried by the Speaker… that is Ophion. Very much alive, very much hesitant to show his face. Whether it is an imposter trying to be hilarious or not we know not, but a white-robed Emissary without a mask would most likely be Ophion’s predecessor Rafael. Who, as you certainly know… effectively died by sacrificing himself to serve as Zodiark’s heart. Meaning that—” 

“Either we have an imposter… or Zodiark’s heart is walking about causing issues?” 

Emet-Selch crossed his arms and nodded. 

“Whichever the case, neither is encouraging. For one would be the very core of Him, wandering about when by all means it ought to still be in Hydaelyn’s shackles—and the other is… someone aware of what they should not be aware of. Which in turn would likely make this an equivalent to the Word of the Mother whose allegiance is a mystery to us.” 

The Exarch nodded this time around, his expression suddenly grim. “We may not have found the Eye, but this is… not something we should keep to ourselves. We but need to find a way to tell it to the others without anything about Ascians or Amaurot included.” 

This time it was Emet-Selch who had to shake his head. As far as timeline integrity was concerned… well, they needed no longer worry too much about that outside of certain events. Evidently enough had been derailed to cause this… or perhaps merely accelerated that process. After all, someone had taught his great-grandson how to best aggravate both Hydaelyn _and_ Zodiark. And whoever this was, they were likely their white-robed mystery that had gone off to prance about with a dragon eye that would be dangerous beyond belief if it made its way into the hands of certain parties. 

“Perhaps it would be wiser to pose this as some internal strife amongst the Ascians. Until we know what exactly it is, it may very well be. But unfortunately, for situations such as these we need many eyes. Those of your Scions and your allies in Ishgard included.” 


	61. INTERLUDE X: Names given, Pasts taken

How exactly this party in particular had taken over Y’shtola’s normal hunting grounds deeper within Anamnesis Anyder was nothing short of a mystery. Not that they were much of a party to begin with—the Warrior of Light had departed nigh immediately, claiming that there was something they needed to check in Emet-Selch’s recreation of Amaurot. And just like that, the party had been reduced to her and Gaia.

Not that either of them minded, really, but searching a whole archive on their own was a daunting task.

“I have no idea how Y’shtola did it,” Ryne said after about an hour of scanning one massive, insurmountable shelf holding several still intact and many more somewhat damaged creation matrices. 

Gaia meanwhile merely drew a finger across some faded etchings that may have been letters once, a faint glow making them much more visible in the dim light of the Tempest that did not help the eerie aura this place had.

“Well, however she did it, I have no idea either. But let us focus more on the task at hand, Ryne. Have you noticed how similar these letters are to Eorzean and Vrandti script yet nothing appears to be matching them? Hells, it appears as if there are _more_ letters in this alphabet than in ours.”

She had noticed that, although the etchings were a surprisingly small sample to draw from. What the shades called creation matrices had several other symbols oft delicately pressed into the crystal, but nothing of any sort made any sense. And the creation matrices’ symbols certainly appeared to be different from whatever this alphabet used. Which… could only mean that there were several alphabets in use.

That much was true of the Source between several countries, and had once been true of the First as well. Moren and the previous keepers of the Cabinet of Curiosity had painstakingly tried to compile several books that kept alive whichever languages survived the onset of the Floor. Everyone spoke the same language on the First now, their numbers much too diminished to keep anything other than one unifying language alive. Something that even the Fae understood despite them very proudly still using their language. There were also several Dwarven dialects that sounded completely alien to the general Vrandti population, but Giott at the Crystarium often laughed that there was essentially no reason to use that outside of family elders meeting to get drunk together. None of the younger Dwarves truly still spoke it, let alone learned any dialects to begin with.

Whatever had gone on in Amaurot, it seemed a lot more complicated than the Source, especially once she and Gaia moved to another shelf.

The letters carved into the unearthly marble looked completely different from the other shelf.

Gaia had her eyes narrowed at them and tried to trace them—clearly an attempt to figure out how that language was supposed to be written. But she failed, repeatedly, and eventually huffed in frustration and crossed her arms. “I would sooner return to getting chastised for reckless combat by Captain Lyna than try to figure out how to write _this_ abomination of a language!”

Ryne tried as well, and much like Gaia she soon had to admit defeat. “… Maybe it was written from right to left instead? Or… down to up?”

“Who would _write_ like that! It beggars belief that the so-called Ancients would do something so… so… stupid!”

She let out a giggle of some sort. “Well, I do not doubt for a moment that any Ascian would call our writing simple and banal in comparison. Disappointing, probably. But the Sundering happened and we lost the knowledge of how to write this script, or the previous one, or whatever exactly goes on on the creation matrices.”

Gaia rolled her eyes with a huff and instead reached for one such matrix. Compared to the almost comically large crystal she almost seemed fragile—which Ryne knew was not the case at all. And indeed, no matter how much Gaia tried to gain a proper grasp on it, she barely managed to nudge the thing, let alone move it from its resting place. She grumbled, unwilling to admit defeat that easily, and Ryne could not help but cackle for a moment while Gaia struggled against the overwhelming weight and sheer mass of the matrix. But as even the most stubborn people had to admit when facing an opponent as immovable like that, Gaia eventually yielded with another huff and instead started tracing the finely printed letters on the matrix. Then, without much of another thought she climbed a little further up and repeated the tracing for a few moments, then once more repeated the process a few more times.

“Huh,” she eventually said and started her descent back down to the floor next to Ryne. “Different alphabets, absolutely—but I do believe that most of these crystals were written on by different people. There’s slight differences between the script on most of these.”

Ryne tilted her head with a hum. “Maybe the creator’s handwriting is on these?”

“Well, whoever wrote the topmost one has an obnoxiously squiggly handwriting and should be ashamed of themselves.”

“Really? Aww, I wanna see myself!”

With that, Ryne started the same climb that Gaia had completed not too long ago, making sure to stop at every crystal and checking them for the writing on them. Indeed, just as Gaia had said there were subtle or glaring differences between some similar symbols—just as the Scions’ handwriting was different every time that the Warrior of Light came back to the First with yet another letter written by Thancred with small additions by the rest of the Scions. One crystal had a fairly elaborately loopy, picture-perfect handwriting on it that even Ryne could see that whoever had made this made certain to brag about how perfect their creation and they themself were. She chuckled—it but made her theory of the Ancients being just the same as their Sundered counterparts hold more theory.

The matrix right above this had a fairly average writing on it, and much as Gaia had claimed, the next one was comparatively incomprehensibly lopsided and squiggly.

“Maybe the creator wrote it in a hurry?”

“Or in a right coffee buzz after not sleeping for three days straight,” came Gaia’s unimpressed reply—Ryne knew she was making a jab at Urianger in particular. “But anyway. Shouldn’t your Master Matoya have had some sort of cipher for these letters? She certainly unearthed a lot of knowledge from here.”

“… Oh. Oh, right,” Ryne gasped, and reached into the bag she carried with her. “She did, and the Exarch even gave me a copy she made for him!”

It was barely more than a notebook, thin yet sturdy, and Ryne flipped it open. Below her, Gaia let out a long sigh. “You can be surprisingly scatterbrained. We’ve wasted what, an hour? And you’ve had a key to all this nonsense the entire time?”

As she started comparing the squiggly script with what Y’shtola had deciphered, she heard Gaia below her start the climb all over again.

Surprisingly enough, despite the clearly shaky hands the writer had when writing, it was easy enough to figure out which letter was which now that she had a cipher. It certainly was a lot of information on that crystal, and Ryne carried on once she realised that she was trying to read a synopsis of what it did that had just enough detail to make her head spin. Near one end of the crystal was one word that seemingly had nothing to do with the other text, and she narrowed her eyes. Maybe that was the creator’s name? Eventually Gaia finished and settled down on the shelf next to her, and Ryne nodded.

“Thank you for reminding me. Anyway, so far I know that this is a concept holding something in regards to… phantoms. The creator’s name is listed as one… uh… I… I don’t know how to pronounce that.”

Gaia shrugged and reached into the bag she carried around. A moment later she retrieved a pen and another notebook, thicker than the one that Ryne had been given but all its pages were empty.

“I bought it for something else, but here. Write it down.”

Ryne nodded and took the pen from Gaia. She was rather happy that she knew how to write Eorzean and Vrandti, although the similarities between the two alphabets made it hard for her to discern it at times. The Scions likewise struggled with keeping the Eorzean out of their Vrandti, but Gaia had only recently started learning Eorzean from Ryne. She made sure to not accidentally write a letter from another alphabet as she spelled the name out.

When she finished, Gaia turned the notebook around so she could read it herself. “Q-U-E-T-Z-A-L-C-O-A-T-L? That is… quite the mouthful.”

Ryne nodded, tilting her head back to the matrix for a moment. “It sounds… vaguely Ronkan. Perhaps this person was part of whatever race came before the Viis?”

Gaia crossed her arms however. “We know next to nothing about the Ancients. Do you truly know that there even _were_ the same people we have now?”

A valid question, but Ryne shook her head and then nodded quickly when Gaia raised an eyebrow at her. “We do, actually. Y’shtola found a much clearer recording from way before the Sundering and the Final Days than the one that revealed Hydaelyn’s summoners to us. And while it was still unclear who exactly the people were, seeing as one party was apparently merely there to listen to the other two, but… The red-masked one listening to the other two had clearly Elven ears poking out below their hood; another one also had those but they were extremely short compared to the other two like a Dwarf; and the third one had holes in their hood and the lower robe as to not squash their Mystel ears or hinder their movement by trapping their also clearly Mystel tail.”

“Huh. I guess your Master Matoya did quite cleanly sweep this place. What are we here for, then?”

“More information on Elidibus. So unfortunately, I know not who this… Quetzalcoatl is, or what their creation does other than something related to phantoms and healing, but it is… irrelevant.”

Gaia sighed dramatically and shrugged. “Well, back to the floor, then.”

* * *

By the time Meteor returned with their usual neutral expression, Ryne and Gaia had made a sort of game out of finding something remotely relevant first. This wing of Anamnesis Anyder clearly was merely a repository for creation matrices like the ones that the Ondo had used when they had come through a nearby wing for the first time; perhaps it hid what they were looking for somewhere amongst the shelves.

An entire shelf had been dedicated to some sorts of marine nonsense by several people but almost overwhelmingly a creator called Llyr. As Gaia then found out, winning that round of finding something more relevant, the shelf was dedicated to creations of great import that holders of the Convocation title Mitron created prior to their receiving of the title. Which gave them reason to believe that each and every single matrix here was of the same sort—the Convocation’s creations before they were given the title.

Ryne won the next round by finding a counter with just enough writing still intact to figure out that they were in fact inside a part of Anamnesis Anyder that was technically unavailable to the public and reserved only for the people working with the Convocation—government officials who very likely knew the names of the Convocation when they were not addressed by their titles.

She also won the next round not because she found something relevant but because she remembered a detail that Y’shtola had shared earlier—an entire shelf dedicated to rather monstrous things from what it sounded like that even gave Gaia the creeps—but the middle row that said what this shelf had been dedicated to had been mostly worn down and made most of the text unreadable. Just as Gaia said that this Volos, whoever that creator in particular was, sounded quite destructive, something had clicked in Ryne’s mind. She went back to the middle row and indeed, one word she could barely make out was the word ‘destroyer. Which meant that this shelf was dedicated to the works of those who bore the title Fandaniel, the Destroyer.

“Bizarre,” had been Gaia’s observation then, “that they had an entire seat dedicated to destruction.” 

Ryne had merely raised her hand and had tried to copy Urianger’s voice the best she could. “Lest thou forgetst, Gaia, ‘tis balance that the world ever craved and shall always crave. For one to create, another one must destroy—else equilibrium be lost.” She then waved her hand dismissively, holding back a giggle. “Or something like that, anyway.”

Gaia then found a shelf that drew Ryne in particular in—one that was dedicated to those of the seat Emet-Selch. And indeed, several matrices bore the name ‘Hades’ on them, all of them with one obnoxiously elegant handwriting and all of them some sort of unbelievably nonsensical base construct. But all of these crystals had this selfsame construct nonsense in their descriptions; Ryne eventually admitted with a grumble that she understood why the seat’s epithet was ‘Architect’ in the end. And Gaia also won another round while Ryne was admitting that she had lost this one—she ran into their mysterious friend Quetzalcoatl again, this time apparently collaborating with one Esther who had later been given the title Healer Halmarut.

“You know… several of these names might be the very people who summoned Zodiark,” Ryne eventually said while scrunching up her face at the crystal in front of her. Spica, later one Chronicler Altima, had apparently created a rather impressive recording tool that automatically translated whatever script the message was written in and could adapt and learn ciphers as well. “We know that Hades was the name of the Emet-Selch we met in the end. Who is to say that it was not… Llyr and Fiachar who brought about the Flood of Light alongside Ardbert and his friends? Or that it was, uhm, Miervaldis, you said? Perhaps that Miervaldis was the same Nabriales who killed Moenbryda.”

Before Gaia could reply anything to that, Meteor announced their presence and the two Oracles hopped off their respective perches and greeted them. The three of them quickly exchanged information—although Meteor admitted with a scowl that there was not much they had to offer. The recreation of Amaurot was like a finely preserved painting; it would look pristine but would never change, and eventually its story would fade. Ryne knew that they had most likely been looking for the Shade that had set them on the right track in regards to how to defeat Emet-Selch once inevitably it came to trading blows. But judging from their mild frustration it seemed as if the Shade yet eluded them, and since the magicks were starting to slightly unravel at the edges by now she was unsure if they would ever find that one again.

Gaia quickly explained what they had been doing and handed Meteor the notebook with Y’shtola’s findings, saying that maybe they could find the shelf dedicated to the seat of Elidibus’ creations faster between the three of them and then threw a grin at Ryne. “Also, I do believe I won our little game.”

* * *

The shelf Ryne was working on by the time Meteor found the one dedicated to Elidibus was… nearly empty. Most of the matrices had been removed long before the Sundering it seemed, and what few matrices remained all had had their author’s name removed. The only thing that remained was the title of the seat which had been so weathered it was impossible to make out. Something ending with -un, but she had no idea what to make of it.

Gaia’s voice rang through the empty hall clearly and loudly as she called for Ryne—and while she had only called for Ryne, both her and Meteor walked to the shelf that Gaia was working on.

“I found our mysterious friend again,” she said as she slowly made her way back down. “It would seem that they were the Speaker Lahabrea at some point in their life. And… most of this shelf is entirely their creations. It is sort of insane, especially given that most of these seem beneficial to the people.”

Meteor crossed their arms and looked at the shelf before shaking their head. “I do wonder if that was the Lahabrea before the one I met. In any case, I did find the shelf dedicated to our Emissary, but it is sparse and there are too many names across the sparseness. Ophion, Rafael, Asteria, Adhara, Estelle, Xian… I wouldn’t know which one our opponent Elidibus is, nor how one of his creations could help us with fighting him.”

Ryne tilted her head. “We learned a lot but yet remain exactly where we started, huh…? I admit it sort of is neat to see what names these Ascians had.”

“It is bizarre, more like. There are perfectly fine if strange names like Spica, Esther, Volos, Ophion, Freyja and Hades. Maybe Eirwen. And then there’s completely insane names like Fiachra, Llyr, Vahagn, Quetzalcoatl, Miervaldis, Loviatar and the one Meteor was looking for, what was it, Hythlodaeus. None of these even remotely sound like _anything_ names on the Source _and_ the First sound like,” Gaia huffed and crossed her arms.

“Vahagn Hagn?” Meteor unhelpfully supplied and shrugged when Gaia merely glared at them. “In any case, we should get back to the Crystarium and share that we found a lot of matrices with names but nothing else of value this time around.”

Meteor turned to leave, and Gaia merely quietly offered Ryne a hand. While the Crystarium might think of her as odd and bristly, it was the little gestures like that that made Ryne happy to have her around. The two of them followed the Warrior of Light quietly and, despite not finding what they came for, contently.

“Oh, and by the way?” Gaia said quietly, almost mischievously at some point close to where Meteor said it would be easier to teleport out of here. “We’re going to find out whether our little ancient friend Quetzalcoatl was the mad one’s predecessor or even older than that. Together. Just the two of us.”

* * *

She had no idea why she brought it up. Perhaps she was simply bored listening in on Unukalhai working with Biggs and Wedge to compile a proper report on Alexander. But the question had slipped out before she could think about the repercussions about what knowing an answer might mean. After all she had promised Gaia that they would find it together with a similarly mischievous grin on her face.

Promises that she would never be able to keep now, but it still felt like she was accidentally betraying Gaia.

Hythlodaeus beside her stretched and drew a hand through his short dark hair—this morning, she had woken up to him almost unceremoniously chopping it down from shoulder length to barely past his Elezen ears and he had still scowled at the mirror unhappily once he was done. “Where in the name of your Twelve did you find _that_ name?”

“Anamnesis Anyder, restricted to government officials section,” Ryne replied quickly and hoped that this might distract him from actually answering her.

“AnAn, C14-RS, Sub-Section Lahabrea, huh.”

“B… Beg your pardon?”

He snorted. “Never you mind that. Quetzalcoatl, yes? One of Akademia Anyder’s most illustrious students and professors both. Professor Quetzalcoatl was in fact such a supermassive monolith in phantom creation that even long before he was made Lahabrea the Convocation came to him with certain issues. How far the mighty have fallen, eh?”

Unukalhai shook his head and strangely animatedly seemed to be copying a cat for a moment, causing Biggs and Wedge to laugh before Wedge nodded and wrote something else down. Ryne meanwhile stared at Hythlodaeus as if the Unsundered had grown thirteen new heads.

“You… that… you mean it’s…?”

She nearly flinched when he put his hand on her head like Thancred had in the past. He was of a different timeline, he couldn’t know. As strange as his unfamiliar hand was, it was also strangely comforting and stopped her mind from tangling itself up in knots as she tried to process what he had just told her.

Heavens, his hand was cold, though. His voice however was almost charmingly warm as he spoke. “Yes. The selfsame Lahabrea likely currently arguing with the Word of the Mother is the one with that name. Speaker Lahabrea when wearing the red mask, Professor with the white when off-duty, and Quetzalcoatl to the few people he considered close enough to let them use the name. Best keep your lips sealed—he may have genuinely forgotten his name by now. I would rather not cause him too much unnecessary stress; he is already unstable enough as is.”

Ryne shook her head. That was… certainly not the answer she would have expected. But her curiosity had been piqued; she narrowed her eyes at him. “I suppose we came come across every member of the Convocation’s names during our search then… all of them except for yours. We barely even made out your _title._ Why is that?”

Hythlodaeus shrugged. “Deserting one’s post taints the entire title. Censure is a mild punishment—being erased entirely but speaks of how grave the action was.” His tone was, as always, painfully cheerful despite how grim his words were. “Though I do admit, knowing that my predecessors were erased for my actions is very much not what they deserved.” 

There was not much she could have said in return; especially since he turned his attention back to Unukalhai, Biggs and Wedge. Unukalhai appeared to be mimicking the first machine they encountered now, swinging one arm around and then going into almost painful detail as to what had happened in that fight. Between both her mysterious companions, the more she learned about Hythlodaeus the less she seemed to understand him—whereas the so cold and quiet Unukalhai appeared to have warmed up to the people around him and acted more like someone who was alive than a cold mirror image of a failed Warrior of Light now. 

“… Were Llyr and Fiachra the last Mitron and Loghrif, then?” 

“Mhm. They indeed were. Does it change your perception of them, knowing their names? I assume not. They are still the two Paragons that brought ruin to your homeworld by exploiting and manipulating your fellow Warriors of Light. Does knowing that Paragon Lahabrea, the Convocation’s Speaker, was named Professor Quetzalcoatl suddenly make him more human, more innocent? Of course not. He still is the one who possessed the man who saved you and caused him quite irreparable damage. Just as knowing that Architect Emet-Selch and Seer Gerun were Hades and Hythlodaeus does not change the fact that one committed atrocities and the other’s inaction made him complicit in them.” A shrug. “Mortals like you highly value names, I know. We did not. It is something you could reconcile with any other than those that have shed their names and become the duty they carry.” 

She had been mostly unconscious, the world more a cloud of agony around her. Yet she had heard the sudden shift in Emet-Selch’s voice as he dropped his title and said his own name. Emet-Selch had been the duty he had carried, yet in that very moment he had chosen to face the Warrior of Light as no one but himself. He had… cast that duty aside to fight with naught but his own strength. And lost. 

Ryne closed her eyes. 

Gaia’s name was all she had had in the beginning. Emet-Selch’s true name was all he had had in the end. 

She had been Minfilia once and was Ryne now—and she did not wish to be anyone else. 

“Maybe we do value names highly. But they are _ours._ No one else’s.” 

“Even if you run into another one with the same name?” 

She shook her head. “I would still be myself. Ryne from the First, Oracle of Light. Just as the other Ryne would be herself, no matter how similar our lives would have been.” 

Truth be told, she expected no answer at all as Unukalhai explained Cruise Chaser’s little trick and how they had avoided the collapsing platform by clinging to the machine. But Hythlodaeus let out a soft chuckle, a genuine-sounding one this time. “You continue being quite fascinating, Oracle. Few sundered would speak with such _conviction_ about such things. Your individuality is both gift and curse, yet you make it sound entirely like a gift. You have quite a way with words.” 

And with that, he got up from the bench off to the side, and joined Unukalhai. He put a hand on the boy’s head and joined in to continue telling the story of how they had to handle pillars that seemed to crumble more and more the longer the fight went on, and instinctually they knew that once the three pillars fell so too would they—making Cruise Chaser a fight that was intensely stressful for all of them. 

Ryne remained where she sat, brows furrowed. 

“If we ever meet again, Gaia, I’ll… have an answer, I suppose,” she muttered to herself after a while and jumped to her feet to join the explanation of how Alexander itself had challenged them to combat afterwards. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you read bygone stages and thought that time travel lahabrea would have the same name as bygone stages lahabrea, sorry
> 
> also theyll come up again, but just for clarity's sake, heres the convocations names at the time of the sundering that have been mentioned so far
> 
> Elidibus: Ophion  
> Emet-Selch: Hades  
> Lahabrea: Quetzalcoatl  
> Igeyorhm: Eirwen  
> Mitron: Llyr  
> Loghrif: Fiachra


	62. ACT IX: The Wall that Fate Scaled, Part 1

There was one single case where Hythlodaeus had _begged_ him to be taken home. Children being children, dangerous jumps being dangerous jumps, and neither of them were healers. In the dark it had been hard to find the then boy and by the time he had found him, the boy had been openly wailing and clung to him as if he was a saviour brought down from the very heavens themselves. Not that he had felt like that in that moment—after all, as much as he respected his mentor there was absolutely no denying he was a horrible father. 

It was something that Rafael admitted towards the end, quietly, long after Seer Gerun had all but tossed his post and title away and stalked off with his head held as highly as ever. His head still high even when they dragged him out of the rubble in utter, manic delirium. High, proud, and downright furious when Emet-Selch and Lahabrea accompanied him to question whether of not their erstwhile Seer had been involved with this Hydaelyn that was winning the battle that should have never been.

Elidibus winced when the four of them exited the Antitower. He had long since learned that the Word of the Mother was _loved,_ but he had underestimated how intensely even after learning what this man had done on the First when his own life hung in the balance. Rather than waste whatever little time he may have had left, he instead recovered as quickly as he could and stalked on out only to free the Oracle of Light from her gilded cage. And while that girl was both the chain binding him and the distant song of freedom on the wind in some regard, there was not a doubt that he loved her just as he had loved her predecessor. Unlike Rafael and Hythlodaeus, Thancred and Minfilia never bade each other farewell like strangers. But much like the Heart of Zodiark and the Wayward Fourteenth, the Word of the Mother and the Rogue Scion separated knowing that one would likely perish and the other would very likely continue living. 

None of the present Scions could as much as even utter a word—like it or not, he was a Scion as much as a Paragon at this point and he counted amongst this group— before Thancred had jumped up from his chair. It toppled over with a deafening clatter but the Rogue had already stormed towards where the two Paragons, the Warrior of Light and the Word of the Mother stood. He said nothing as he shoved past Elidibus and Lahabrea to lunge at and sling his arms around the Word of the Mother. The first true sound other than the chair landing was a horrendous choked sob of utter relief that tore its way out of Thancred’s throat as he held Minfilia tightly.

For all her stern defiance and determination, it only took a moment for Minfilia to lose her learned composure, and she slung her arms around the man in return, a small laugh escaping her as they both sunk to the ground together.

Hythlodaeus had clung to him similarly, wailing in relief just as Thancred was right now. And Elidibus, much like Minfilia had not been able to do more than half-cry, half-laugh and utter reassurances that he was there just as she was doing now.

“I’m here,” Minfilia eventually choked out properly, loudly, into the room full of people.

“I’m here,” Elidibus-then-called-Ophion had whispered and gathered then-Hythlodaeus-with-a-broken-leg in his arms before carrying him home.

The Scions Krile and Alphinaud also stormed over; the Lalafell with tears in her eyes as she started patting Thancred’s back, the Elezen with teary eyes as well but a learned composure that spoke of the growth through agony he had gone through ever since that bloody banquet. 

How much longer would he be able to claim that this alliance was temporary and that he was willing to sell these _people_ for the greater good still? 

He was not entirely certain any longer. Just before the skies had cracked and split he had been ready to walk over the corpses of _more_ people. He knew no longer if he still could, and begged Zodiark to forgive him this weakness. 

He received no answer.

As always.

* * *

Ishgard during the blizzards that repeatedly blew through Coerthas after the latest Calamity truly rattled at the aetherial balance that always tilted towards liveability on the Source was both quite stunning to behold and utterly, devastatingly deadly. The blinding onset of white skies and white snow before a grey curtain fell and the winds rose with a howl that threatened to blow away each and every single person who not immediately sought shelter or was held down by armour of some kind. Indeed, the guard at the Steps of Faith regarded him with a worried glance—the snowfall was heavy and the winds were strong enough to likely lift a Lalafell off their feet, and for all intents and purposes Elidibus looked like a teenager in this terrible weather. A teenager who was ready to cross the Steps of Faith and march to Camp Dragonhead on foot, a travel that took about half a day.

But once the guard noticed his ears, they understood that they were not dealing with a young Elezen or Hyur who wanted to test their strength against the elements themselves but rather with one of the recently returned Warriors of Light.

Lahabrea, the Warrior of Light and the Word of the Mother along with the rest of the Scions would remain within Ishgard for a little longer, likely for this season to pass so that they could start the long road to Mor Dhona without danger of getting buried alive in an avalanche and with the support of the soon-to-be returned to the Eorzean Alliance Ishgard’s forces. Elidibus, however, was not going to let a celebration tie him down. There was something that bothered him about Coerthas in conjunction with the missing Eye and the fact that neither Team Alexander nor Team Azys Lla had reported back yet. By all right, the damned thing should have been in Dravania by this point but even as they trekked back alongside the Word of the Mother and her fine aethersight, she reported that no such thing was anywhere within Dravania. The only thing that matched the aetheric signature she was looking for had been a fading outcrop of aether in the Forelands, located within the volcanic cavern systems that made up Mourn and the lowest parts of Sohm Al. Nidhogg’s final resting place.

A howl of wind barrelled across the Steps of Faith. Elidibus did not lose his footing, although he had to secure the scabbard he carried his rapier around in. The stone sentinels watched quietly, unmovingly, as he continued marching over the bridge with his head ducked ever so slightly to pretend the weather was even affecting him by this point. Hells, halfway across he stopped a moment to greet a Chocobo carriage’s rider who stopped to offer him a moment without wind to stuff his tail below the coat; another little play-pretend that he was a mortal in their one life. He thanked the Elezen merchant politely, and the man laughed loudly.

“Weather like this, ‘s the least I could do given that we’s goin’ different directions, lad. Careful not to go flyin’ off now, eh?”

“Mhm. Likewise—and thank you once more.”

It was strange, very strange, to behold the Source through this lens that he knew the Warrior of Light ever saw it through. Ishgard should have been all grizzled and weary and angry. Many souls were—Ser Aymeric and Lady Ysayle were dealing with no small amount of displeased old ones, war veterans, revenge-hungry traitors who were accused of something they had not not done and lost their family and home besides because of it. But for every scar-faced and world-weary person moaning about how they needed to wipe the rest of the Horde out there were at least three Brume younglings who at first hesitantly approached heretics and dragons both and now greeted them like family friends whenever they came to the city for more logistics talks. Shortly before he himself had departed for the First to tackle the issue of a foiled Rejoining and Emet-Selch’s demise at the hands of the Warrior of Light, Ishgard in the old timeline had started rebuilding. Much too late, already involved in another war once more via their membership of the Eorzean Alliance just as he had intended.

But now, left to their own devices, the once hesitant and almost insecure youngest Haillenarte had all but rushed forward while the Warriors of Light were gone with not only Ser Haurchefant by his side but also a young dragoon named Heustienne and a dragonet to suggest rebuilding programs that not only concerned the Firmament this time but also involved the Skysteel Manufactory and the sudden prospect of commerce with the other city states as well as the heretic settlements within the Western Highlands and beyond. Even the normally subdued and professional Lady Iceheart had let out a chuckle at the sudden enthusiasm and had turned her gaze heavensward, quietly saying that perhaps one day the Churning Mists would belong to bot Landlords and Skylords again. It would not be in their lifetime, it might not even be for another two millennia—but if two thousand years of war had not completely destroyed the seed of friendship between dragonkind and Ishgard and merely set it back, then within another two millennia they could regain what they had lost to treachery if they but believed.

Hadn’t the Convocation laboured under the same banner after the skies stopped spewing molten rock, ash and blood?

The gatekeeper greeted him, and Elidibus lamely returned the greeting before continuing his march. Rather than across set stone at the mercy of the wind he now instead travelled across half-destroyed and mostly buried pathways. Pieces of Dalamud had carved themselves into the earth beyond the mountain range on his right, and all that the Calamity had wrought here was the destruction of infrastructure as well as the local climate. Yet somehow despite that, the Ishgardians and the Coerthan wildlife both had carved their way across once-familiar paths, had dug out parts of the streets that once connected Camp Dragonhead to the Observatorium and Whitebrim Front and therefore Ishgard somehow to the Black Shroud. Knights patrolling Coerthas on leave to visit family and loved ones seemed to be in an unusually cheerful mood ever since the Dragonsong War had found its end, some even suggesting that perhaps it was long time they retook the Dzemael Darkhold and built a proper path to connect to Mor Dhona beyond the mountains that hid the Aurum Vale.

It was bizarre how easily the Sundered bounced back from events like Calamities and Floods of Light—and while they forgot, while they changed events to fit their historical narrative, while they twisted even heroes into villains without a second thought, they somehow managed to stand every single time. Something that not even Amaurot had managed as they stood amongst the ruins of their remaining lives. The arguments that arose after Termination that never ceased and never had them yield to even a small compromise in favour of the other side when in the past the very voices arguing had calmly talked about it and reached an understanding sometimes leaning towards the other side. The Speaker’s voice fell quiet, the Listener grew tired of listening, and not a soul paid heed to the Emissary trying to smooth over the waves. They had survived, they should have worked together to see Zodiark’s sacrifices paid off. The people would return as long as they worked together. There was no other way.

There may have been, the Healer eventually cracked, sobbing amongst her once again flourishing gardens, perhaps the Seer had been right. She did not regret her choices, not much at the very least, Halmarut had admitted, but the argument of trading more life for life was wearing her down.

The knowledge that their time was limited made these mortals fickle. But at the same time—and he begged each and every soul he wished to return to this world to forgive him for this thought—was nigh immortality not what had driven such a wedge between those that survived disaster twice?

No city on any shard could compare to Amaurot or any other settlement that Termination had devoured like a mindless animal on the hunt, yet would they not think the same for a while and then try to rebuild the home lost after mourning the lives gone?

So arduous a path, and Emet-Selch had cracked at the end. Lahabrea had died screaming in defiance that this could not be happening. Pieces of Mitron and Loghrif died apart, Igeyorhm died once without dignity and once with indignity, and even the proud Nabriales had been reduced to begging. At the end of it all he had been the last Unsundered; Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus died with acceptance and Lahabrea continued being in his grand delusion of guilt turned to rage to the very last moment.

Amaurot had been buried under ash and soot and blood and it had ground to a standstill of indecisiveness that turned to defiance because they tried to plan for eternity.

Any mortal empire’s survivors reflected on their mistakes and decided to rebuild after having learned from them despite them never getting to see the fruit of their labour.

* * *

He waited until the blizzard passed. Then, nigh immediately, while frost that had crept up the windows on the outside slowly but steadily started to decline as more people in Camp Dragonhead awoke, Elidibus immediately departed for the highest vantage point with the first morning change of the guard. Strategically he had politely requested Scion Y’shtola’s aetherometre before his departure and placed it on his face—not a single Elezen guard dared interrupting someone with a Sharlayan piece of technology and he was able to scan this part of Coerthas for any aetheric oddities that might give away whether the Eye was here or not. But all he spotted for almost countless bells, three changes of the guard in the bitter cold, were an occasional aetheric disturbance that was clearly aligned to ice and therefore irrelevant to him. The dread wyrm Nidhogg churned with darkness—darkness that had vanished without a trace, seemingly. At some point he had made a point in pulling part of his weapon out and held it with his free hand, channelling the nearby wellspring of ice through it and creating an illusion of fire that he quenched whenever some other guard passed him by.

He heard steps approaching and once more dismissed the little fanciful illusion, but the steps slowed down. He silently begged the guard to continue onwards, but of course he would have no such luck. Worse yet, he flinched when he felt a heavy gauntleted hand on his shoulder. Both part of his weapon and the aetherometre landed softly in the snow that had gathered around him, and Elidibus found himself staring straight into an unfortunately familiar face.

“Ah, Emissary,” Haurchefant said with an apologetic tone in his voice, “I was wondering whether it was you or the Exarch.”

“Lord Haurchefant.”

“You have been up here all by your lonesome for quite a while. While the guards pass you off as mage perfectly capable of keeping yourself warm, I cannot help but worry a little, if you permit me to be so forward. I do not doubt your prowess as a mage, make no mistake, but you are a Red Mage, correct? You ought to take a break to replenish your own aether, the healers say. Or at least move to circulate it a little better; the cold tends to close down important aetherial channels that eventually leads to hypothermia.”

He raised an eyebrow under his mask and shrugged with a sigh. “You will not leave ere I either rest inside or move, I can see that much on your face. Very well—movement.” Mostly because if he had to spend more time than necessary with the Sundered right now he was likely going to scream.

Haurchefant nodded and leaned down to pick up what Elidibus had dropped and handed it back over. “You are still searching for the Eye, are you not?”

“Yes.”

Whether it was noon or afternoon, the skies had cleared up to almost ridiculously blue by now. The sun sparkled obnoxiously on the pristine white snow that lay untouched on the roofs of Camp Dragonhead and between where the snow had either been cleared out or simply been trampled down by people forging on ahead. That much never changed, it seemed; although the sun had always sparkled and gleamed off of Amaurot’s buildings that most people likened to black crystal at times. The gleam and contrast between the dark buildings and the rare snow in winter had always painted smiles on peoples’ faces—this here was a military garrison in a snow-torn country and he felt somewhat ridiculous for comparing a thriving city to that. Down from the imposing walls, where the main thoroughfare went, a merchant was saddling his Chocobo again. A handful knights left the building they had been in, chattering casually. Occasionally someone threw a nervous glance at the sky before remembering that the beat of wings no longer heralded death and destruction but could not be likened to a promise of peace.

It made the knight behind him chuckle. “Who would have thought that one day we would turn our eyes ever heavensward not with fear but wonder? Had I known that this ragtag quartet of adventurers alongside a Scion of the Seventh Dawn and the long-missing Cid Garlond would end the Dragonsong War, why, I would not have saddled you with such pointless tasks.”

Elidibus narrowed his eyes and lashed his tail. “Tch. Few people can boast an Echo that lets them see flashes of the future, and fewer still would fault you for treating us like any pack of adventurers in search for something. We needed the proper work to conduct our search for the Enterprise, and you and Camp Dragonhead readily offered us such. If nothing else, in the grand design of the story you acted perfectly fine for the story waiting to be told. If not us, then perhaps the next adventurer you welcomed to Camp Dragonhead and offered hearth and home for a while might have done what we did in the end. You could not have known. But your hospitality is what made this possible just as much as our… ah, brute strength and blessings.”

The knight laughed and Elidibus rolled his eyes. After all the adventurer Eorzea called Emissary was not someone who spent too much time making idle small talk and instead focused on the tasks at hand, just as the Ascian Elidibus always did. He flicked his gaze out towards the edge of Coerthas, quickly scanning the area for anything strange to his aethersight. There was a faint glimmer of fire moving underneath an ice crust, likely heretics showing another handful knights how they had moved through Coerthas so quickly. Towards Whitebrim Front, knights were fighting off a horde of ice sprites that had sprung up during the blizzard and that were visible and vulnerable now that the snow had ceased falling and the skies were clear.

The First Mountains held a faint glimmer of more concentrated wind aether—likely stolen crystals transformed to one day feed their energy into a return of the Primal Garuda, but the amount was too insignificant to be worried about right now.

What he was worried about once he caught a shimmering, blinding flash of light as if the sun reflected off of polished armour, was that the self-proclaimed Warriors of Darkness were close to Natalan and Xelphatol. He stopped with his ears drawn back and fumbled to reach for the aetherometre and quietly put it on while Haurchefant asked what exactly was wrong.

Elidibus shook his head once he dropped the aetherometre back around his neck and closed his eyes.

“Pray excuse me, Lord Haurchefant. While not the Eye, something caught my attention and I had best depart now ere it leaves.”

Without waiting for another word, Elidibus decided to play the energetic Miqo’te he was supposed to be and swung himself over the wall and down onto a roof below. The Elezen knight let out a surprised shout of sorts as Elidibus made certain there was no one below him and trampled loose some of the snow to gain enough speed to bounce off the edge of the roof and on top of a Chocobo carriage. Several other surprised people yelled after him as he hurriedly departed from Camp Dragonhead through the gate that led towards the Steel Vigil and Natalan.

* * *

Truth be told, Elidibus expected an attack immediately. But no such thing happened—indeed, the Elf stopped the Mystel from drawing an arrow from her quiver when he appeared in front of them and the rest of the group remained surprisingly unbothered by his sudden appearance. Once he had gotten enough space between Camp Dragonhead and him he had all but rushed through a portal to catch the group from the First where they were. It had been quite a while since he had donned the proper robes of an Emissary, and clearly the Warriors of Light were confused as to why he appeared now looking like this when they already knew what he was doing otherwise.

Even more surprisingly, the leader of the group invited him to explain himself rather than immediately start demanding answers.

Elidibus closed his eyes and put a hand in front of his face as if to reveal his glyph. “You are no strangers to bizarre tales, but mine is one that will be stranger than any you have ever heard.” And with that, he drew his hand down to reveal his glyph after all. “Though lost on those aligned with Hydaelyn Herself, I give you the Emissary’s oath of speaking naught but the truth in a search for understanding.”

And so he began—not with the Sundering, seeing as those erstwhile heroes had heard as much in Kholusia already. Instead, Elidibus started where it all truly began for him to wind up here—with the Seventh Umbral Era coming to an end following the defeat of the Ascian Overlord Lahabrea at the hands of an adventurer that people soon called Warrior of Light. The Warriors of Light from the First made for rather attentive listeners, and while there were several points where they moved or made some noise of surprise or disbelief, they not once interrupted him.

Only once he stopped did the Dwarf cross her arms. “What you said in Kholusia… that we could save the First’s essence at the very least… was it a lie?”

He shook his head.

“The path has changed. But the fact that it has been saved in the past and that the elements for its salvation exist on it even now remains. All that remains is finding a way to save it without the Word of the Mother—a part that the Oracle of Light could cover easily if you permit her to.” Elidibus folded his hands together and closed his eyes. “In fact, I am starting to fear that one event is irreversibly part of this timeline, no matter how much we rail against it, but pray permit me to ask one question in particular: the Eye. You were not responsible for the mysterious disappearance of the second Eye of Nidhogg, were you?”

All five of them shook their heads, with the Mystel muttering something along the lines of “I mean, makes sense he had two, but I had no idea,” to the Hume.

Holding back a weary sigh, Elidibus shook his head again. “I see. In that case, it likely will already be in the hands of… certain elements that ought not have gotten their hands on it. I admit, in the past it was I who supplemented the Eyes, multiple, to said elements in search of a way to hasten the Ardor. As it turned out, a mistake. A grave one, even. One that all but hastened this world and any other towards certain doom.”

Silence, once more.

“If I may,” the Elf started hesitantly, his voice muffled by his robes, “assuming that which you said was the truth, is there not a way we may yet assist before we find a way to save the First?”

The timeline was proceeding much too quickly. If it continued at this rapid pace, then doubtlessly the chance to keep the First from becoming a Void of Mitron’s making would arise near the point where the Primal Shinryu would doubtlessly awaken above Baelsar’s Wall.

Elidibus breathed in slowly and exhaled just as slowly. “Baelsar’s Wall separates the Black Shroud from the Fringes of Gyr Abania. It is there that this tragedy will unfold—I bid you watch for signs of the Alliance suddenly and inexplicably storming part of it.”

The Mystel flicked one ear towards the rift in the ground that the locals called Witchdrop and turned her head with a scowl.

Ah, right.

He had nearly forgotten about that little incident, seeing as it had been pointless in the greater design of things. Another oversight that had made his plans crumble and something that Lahabrea would have relentlessly scolded him for. But right now she represented a problem—a problem he could control, however. She must not have arrived before now, and given that the Antecedent had returned she had likely been summoned by her brother or the Elezen who knew where she was.

“That would be all.”

“What about the Elf?” the knight asked quietly after having remained silent and thoughtful throughout the entire conversation. 

“Worry not,” Elidibus said, this time making certain to sound like the proper Emissary. “All things in time. The pieces have been cast, and it is high time we watched how they unfold at Baelsar’s Wall.”

With that, he nodded at them, begging them to understand what he meant with that and departed. Thankfully it seemed as if the Warriors of Light understood, and Elidibus could return close to Camp Dragonhead as the adventurer rather than the Ascian and make certain that the missing Leveilleur understood that she was _not_ to interfere wildly and recklessly.

* * *

Alisaie Leveilleur turned out to be just as stubborn as Hythlodaeus when he had been the equivalent to her age. Of course, there were several centuries worth of trouble between Hythlodaeus at that age and this little sundered brat that stormed into Camp Dragonhead just as he also returned. But he made certain to grab her arm and to politely yet confusedly ask what Alphinaud was doing here and why he was dressed like that.

The girl immediately started pelting him with glares so sharp that he could have and should have dropped dead from them alone, but the moment she saw his red hair and the rapier at his side she narrowed her eyes in confusion.

“You… you’re Emissary, aren’t you?”

“… Ah. That would make you the Lady Alisaie rather than your brother, I presume?”

“Drop the lady or I’ll show you just how ladylike I can be,” she snarled, and Elidibus let out a chuckle.

“My apologies then, Alisaie. And my apologies for stopping you when you appear to be in such a hurry. Pray tell, is there a way I can assist?”

She seemed to be taken aback by him offering his help, likely running on older information on how strangely distant some of the Warriors of Light could be due to how many of them there were. In fact, she blinked at him sort of dumbly and stared at his rapier once again.

“… No, I am afraid not,” she eventually squeezed out and turned to leave.

“Wait, please. Is there aught you wish for me to tell your brother? You have been gone for quite a while, and he quite often mentions things that you would enjoy seeing around Ishgard and any other place we have gone to. I may not be versed very well in the arts of understanding people, but he sounds rather a lot like he misses you dearly.”

A soft tremble went through the Elezen as she curled her hands into fists.

“Tell him I am fine. But I genuinely do need to get going, Emissary.”

“Wherever to? Perhaps I can assist after all.”

She turned back around to face him, a mix between anger and exasperation on her face. “Sometimes I do wonder how that many of you became Warriors of Light so beloved by the population, but I think I am beginning to understand. And with that understanding comes more confusion as to how this infernal realm has not ground you and your ideals into paste yet. There is something I need to investigate in the Black Shroud. And now bother me no further, I beg you. Anything else I will be reporting to the Scions directly.”

He had tortured her enough, he reckoned, and nodded at her. “Understood. Take care out there, Scion.”

Being called a Scion made her pause for a moment longer. For someone who so violently fought for what she deemed right, this version of her had yet to go through quite a lot of growth it seemed. But she sounded surprisingly like the selfsame Elezen who had caused quite a lot of trouble with how ferociously devoted she was to the Scions in particular when she now said “Thank you. You take care out there as well, Warrior of Light”.


	63. ACT IX: The Wall that Fate Scaled, Part 2

Elidibus informed them of his suspicion rather curtly and without much explanation. Frankly, he was wondering how the Ascian had managed to keep his head considering that Ardbert was the same brand of hot-headed fool who punched first and asked questions later as Meteor. Then again, he mused idly and looked beside him, the Sundering also cleaved certain parts of the person’s personality apart. While Emet-Selch had described it as a simple matter of division until all was spread thin in equal measures, there was no denying that Ardbert appeared to be more thoughtful than the quiet yet somehow not-thinking Meteor was. Ever since the First had been saved, however, Meteor had developed an almost witty biting brand of sarcasm and was less liable to storm blindly up ahead. They accepted less challenges without thinking about it first, to the point that they had eventually admitted that they did not particularly feel like following Elidibus’ unspoken invitation to fight to the death.

Of course, that hardly mattered once the Ascian made his move—they were the person who had murdered his brothers and he fancied himself the Emissary of Vengeance for a spot rather than the Unsundered Elidibus.

In any case, the Exarch wormed his way out of Meteor’s arms in their quarters in the Rising Stones. He hurriedly put everything in place, right down to once more hiding the crystal on his face, and noted with a scowl that a new crack had crept up his cheek. Likewise, it seemed as if it had further wandered down from his other shoulder and had dipped below his ribs. Much as he had suspected, the crystal was spreading.

Slowly, of course, but just enough that it was starting to get harder to cover it up. If it crept down his Spoken arm any further than that he would have to fake an incident of some sort to warrant proper covering gear without getting any uncomfortable questions.

Elidibus suspected that the Eye had already found its way to the Resistance and therefore right into Ilberd’s hands.

As Emet-Selch had immediately said upon their return to the Rising Stones, he suspected something was afoot and hissed something in Amaurotine that made both Lahabrea and Elidibus go immensely pale and the fourth Unsundered reacted to it with a scowl and crossed arms.

Ever since, they bided their time. With the Warriors of Darkness not wreaking havoc and instead watching Baelsar’s Wall and with the Lady Alisaie also in the Black Shroud rather than shadowing Urianger for a while, an almost strangely fragile and uneasy peace had settled over Mor Dhona. A handful of Scions were due to return from their missions today, and the Exarch slipped out of the room quietly. The Exarch had given up his room for Krile, something she had accepted with both a smile and a wink—while they never intended to make much of a secret of it, with the return of Minfilia and filling her in on things officially, Meteor had eventually scratched the back of their neck and officially announced that they and the Exarch were, as Thancred put it, ‘an item’.

The morning in the Rising Stones was quiet and surprisingly few people were up at the crack of dawn like that; Tataru greeted him quietly and reached for the steaming cup of tea that accompanied her to her desk whenever she returned here. F’lhammin raised a hand and softly asked if he wanted a cup of tea as well which he politely declined. In the back room it seemed as if Lady Yugiri had returned from one of her duties for a spell and she was holding a polite but pleasant conversation with Doware.

The next to leave the quarters was, surprisingly enough, Minfilia.

Her eyes were no longer blank mirrors of icy crystal, but they would never quite return to the way they were. They were crystalline blue and colder in tone than before, yes, but she no longer looked like a flawless representation of Hydaelyn had taken over her face.

Mornings in the Rising Stones reminded him of mornings with the Ironworks and gatherings during the first year of his arrival on the First. They were quiet, yes, but there was an unspoken sense of duty in the air as well as they all went about their business. Yugiri bade farewell to Doware, stopped beside Minfilia and bowed before her, a surprisingly wide for the normally so calm and collected shinobi smile on her face—which Minfilia returned and reached for her hands. Whatever those two said to each other he did not hear as he nodded to Riol who had but returned in the middle of the night it seemed.

Conversation was slow and pleasant as little by little other Scions awoke; Thancred in particular froze in the door for a moment with an incomprehensible expression on his face before a small, almost relieved yet sad smile appeared on his face as he walked towards F’lhammin. The Exarch remembered feeling the exact same—the incomprehensible sadness of thinking that someone he had watched grow was gone, only to find them alive and well and bidding him a pleasant morning before marching off with the rest of the Crystarium Guard on the usual patrol routes.

If the fates were kind, Lyna would have a life without too much hardship this time around. Perhaps she would be born amongst the boughs of Rak’tika, or perhaps her parents once again wound up leaving the forest to see the world. Except that this time around there would be no Sin Eater attack that killed both women and left Lyna orphaned.

He shook off the urge to sigh and instead turned to ask Riol how things looked beyond Alliance territory—but before he could ask his question, the front door opened. Ryne and Lahabrea who appeared to have woken at the same time and were leaving the quarters side-by-side froze as they looked towards the person who stormed in. But the alarm that most people turned with faded immediately once they saw it was merely Wilred who had stormed in; and the Ala Mhigan froze when he saw Minfilia herself. For a long moment everyone held their breath, both Wilred and the rest of the Scions waiting for someone to say the first thing to break the sudden tension.

“A-Antecedent…!” Wilred eventually caved and broke the silence himself.

The Rising Stones started moving again once Minfilia laughed and wished him a good morning. Ryne started walking and requested a tea from F’lhammin, Lahabrea slunk around the corners and chose a seat near Riol and the Exarch and simply deflated with a sigh—apparently he had woken not entirely voluntarily, and the suspicion soon found ground when Thancred, of all Scions Thancred, sat down opposite the Ascian with a wry smile and a joking “That’s for the night you kept me up by talking aetherology with Krile, by the way” out of his mouth which Lahabrea nailed with a tired glare.

History books failed to mention just how casual the Scions could be. History lived was always different than history learned, and he was starting to understand one fundamental, almost impossible to change difference that may have driven Amaurot and the world to the breaking point it eventually reached. The Exarch, too, had slowed down considerably. He argued more about thinking everything through in perfect detail, while the more impulsive, often unforeseeably distant choices happened almost rapidly once everyone got going. He saw it in how Aymeric and Ysayle all but sprinted up ahead and how the older dragons were slow to warm up to it, while the younger dragons and the Elezen almost all wanted to see if they could pave the way for the future that those two imagined. Estinien served as a connection point between those that felt things were going too fast, a living reminder that vengeance eventually earned nothing but a hollow victory. History books had talked about how the peace summit had nearly gone wrong before any dragon even arrived thanks to a heartfelt cry for vengeance and a noble’s idiotic decision—once again, the selfsame woman had rallied those who held the same sentiments as her, but rather than be faced with a crowd watching the preparations for a peace summit the only audience they found was Estinien in the middle of nowhere. He had intercepted them.

Had told them that he _understood_ the feeling, but also that he had gotten his revenge and that the voices of Ferndale and his fellow knights dragoon that cried for dragon blood never ceased. That it would have been a hollow victory had he not a future of peace for their children and their children’s children to pave.

Between the deep blue of the sky that Aymeric’s title spoke of and the white ice of Ysayle’s title stood a dragoon in azure.

And while the sentiment of resentment might never quite fade, they too had something to look to the future for: their fellow survivors. While dragons would no longer kill them, they still had each other to look out for. And if the thirst for vengeance ever became too much or finally lessened, they could always travel the world as adventurers to see if vengeance could not be used for the good of the realm instead or they could offer their help to the Haillenartes in their quest to rebuild not only the Firmament but also see the Brume made a better place alongside Count Durendaire.

The Exarch, meanwhile, was stuck between wanting to discuss everything to the utmost detail and working towards the future as blindly as he could.

If he already was so torn, he could not even remotely begin to imagine how the Amaurotines felt standing amidst the ruins of their home.

“—found them during my trip home,” Wilred said and the Exarch turned his head back towards the centre of the room.

More Scions had since crawled from their quarters, including Hythlodaeus, Meteor and Unukalhai and a handful people he could barely keep track of. While not many, with eight supposed Warriors of Light the number of Scions had almost ridiculously grown compared to what history books told.

“You returned to Little Ala Mhigo?” Thancred asked just loudly enough to make the notoriously morning-weary Lahabrea groan and cover his ears. “What if any remaining Braves had found you?”

Wilred half-turned around and shook his head. “I thought of that as well, but no such thing happened. Instead, I found Little Ala Mhigo abuzz with talk about the Resistance faction under the Griffin.”

Minfilia, having been filled in on what would come to pass if no one put a stop to it, surprisingly enough managed to hold her little facade rather well. Despite knowing too much for her own good at this point, she still was Ala Mhigan at heart. “I would like to see one of this Griffin’s speeches for myself… of course after we talk to Yda and Papalymo.”

Ah.

That was the conversation he had missed. Rather than an accidental meeting at one of the Griffin’s speeches, it would seem that young Wilred had been the one to run into the two of them this time around.

* * *

Southern Thanalan was, compared to the rest of the realm, blisteringly hot this time of the year. While large amounts of him were crystal nowadays, the Exarch noted with a wry smile once some members of their little party started complaining about the heat, he was still a Seeker of the Sun. Elidibus likewise seemed unaffected, as were Ryne and Meteor due to the fact that Ryne had spent a lot of time in Amh Araeng and Meteor because they were used to travelling. Minfilia and Wilred were Ala Mhigan and had grown up in Thanalan for the most part, making them used to sudden bouts of dry heat. Shockingly enough, the normally first to complain Lahabrea also did not seem to be minding the heat at all, something that the Exarch reckoned had something to do with him usually playing with fire in the literal sense when it came to creation.

“I was… certainly not made for temperatures like this,” Unukalhai wheezed out while leaning against the shadowed side of a rock. Beside him stood Hythlodaeus who in turn was next to Emet-Selch, one with a grim expression and the other with a mildly concerning smile.

“Neither was I,” Emet-Selch hissed, which earned the both of them a hand on their shoulders from Hythlodaeus who had been between them.

“I feel like death incarnate, yet it will be your whining that finally does me in.”

It earned them some laughter from several party members—and an almost concerned glance from Minfilia.

It was not unusual for adventurers to band together for a while when they came under the weather. Disguised as down on their luck adventurers as they were, with Minfilia and Wilred leading the group clearly of Ala Mhigan descent, it would only take so long for someone from the Resistance to approach them in case they did not find Yda and Papalymo first.

“I do have been wondering… if you do not mind me asking, where do all of you hail from that some appear unaffected by the heat and others, well…?” Wilred gestured vaguely at the trio still not entirely willing to leave their perch behind that rock.

“Garlemald,” Emet-Selch hissed and shook off Hythlodaeus’ hand. “Not that I hold any affection for it, mind.”

“La Noscea.” Technically not a lie, having grown up in Eulmore and all, but the Exarch remembered that no one truly knew where she had been born in the first place. Something that Ryne was painfully aware of now that her home as it had been did not exist.

“La Noscea as well,” Meteor cheerfully hummed. “This dry heat is nothing compared to that humid hell.”

“Mor Dhona.” Unukalhai refused to elaborate further, but children born and raised on the road were not uncommon amongst adventurers and most of these children became adventurers themselves. Although from the sounds of it, Frontier had been essentially the Thirteenth’s equivalent of Limsa Lominsa and Eulmore—which meant that Unukalhai did not consider it home and instead chose the place he arguably died at his point of origin.

“Sharlayan,” the Exarch eventually said slowly. While not his place of birth, he had always considered it his home until the had helped build the Crystarium.

“An excellent question, Wilred,” Elidibus followed it up nonchalantly and he threw up both arms while shrugging. Krile had filled in the rest of the Scions about the strange circumstances of the Emissary and the Exarch, and he scowled at the Ascian. “Albeit not one I can answer entirely, considering that arguably my point of origin is an abandoned Allagan facility and my birth not a natural one.”

For a moment there was a pause as all eyes turned to Hythlodaeus and Lahabrea. The Seer appeared unbothered, but it was hard to ignore that Lahabrea appeared to be grinding his teeth either in annoyance or frustration.

“Coerthas,” Hythlodaeus eventually said flatly.

“….” Lahabrea remained silent for several more heartbeats. Poor Wilred started fidgeting; he looked almost ready to apologise for his innocent question that sprung from genuine curiosity about people he considered his allies. But even, eventually, just as Wilred opened his mouth to apologise, the tense Lahabrea relaxed a little and shook his head. “Irrelevant.”

Minfilia still did not entirely trust the Ascian, evidently, considering how she crossed her arms at that statement and closed her eyes. Wilred meanwhile ducked slightly, an unspoken apology directed at Lahabrea hanging heavy in the air before he coughed and said that if anything, the Griffin was most liable to choose the entry section of the Sunken Temple of Qarn as a place to hold speeches now that the place had been purged of any remaining beasts and Voidsent.

* * *

It had been a tense if pleasant reunion, Meteor had said. Still believing that she was her sister and actual Archon Yda, Lyse’s facade had gained its first blatantly obvious cracks in how much she felt for her countrymen’s plight. She did not agree with the Griffin, she was technically part of another Resistance faction altogether, but even with her having a feeling that the Griffin was Ilberd there was no denying that his words helped stoke the desire for freedom even within her. He knew how to speak to the people, Lahabrea admitted during the speech they attended, with a wistful expression on his face. Most others missed it, but the Exarch clearly saw how Elidibus brushed past Lahabrea with a quick hand to his shoulder and some low words exchanged in Amaurotine. 

Meteor had also admitted that they had caught the looks that Papalymo had shot “Yda”, a genuine mixture of affection and what appeared to be both pity and an anger they could not place until halfway across the ocean with Lyse excitedly chatting with the pirates. While the Scions all knew that this was a young woman playing her older sister who had ever guided her through her life and without whom she was lost, it had not struck Meteor until that very moment that Papalymo of all people had likely spent the most time addressing her as Lyse rather than Yda when no one but them was around. He had taken care of her for reasons that no one quite understood—Meteor reckoned that he had genuinely cared for the real Yda and wanted to make sure that her sister and her family’s ideals did not go under, but that he never quite liked that Lyse all but erased herself in the process.

Needless to say, Meteor was speechless when the little group of Ala Mhigan Scions and the Warriors of Light ran into their missing fellows—and the once-masked “Yda” immediately shrunk backwards and away from her fellows due to not wearing a mask any longer.

“Perhaps this conversation is best taken elsewhere,” Papalymo then said and marched off without waiting for any confirmation that the others were going to follow.

Indeed, Lahabrea shook his head and said that he was going to remain here to listen further to this ‘drivel meant to incite violence’ as he put it, and Unukalhai and Ryne stayed with him.

He knew the pain of being unmasked at an inopportune moment—he had meant to keep the faceless Exarch play up until the end, so that he could vanish as the stranger who never quite acted with a strange aura around him. Of course, that had all but been undone by the sheer overwhelming might of the light fighting against his attempt to drain it and by Emet-Selch so timely arriving and putting a bullet through his back. He swore he could feel the phantom pain of that wound squarely in the middle of his chest as he hesitantly reached for Meteor’s arm to put his hand against it. They were tense, he was tense, but somehow both of them relaxed a little when he did that and they continued following the group.

They gathered somewhere off the entrance to the Sunken Temple, far enough that no one would overhear them but still close enough to not rouse any suspicion. Nothing but a handful adventurers talking with members of the Resistance during a rally. It was nothing unusual. Before either Papalymo or “Yda” could say anything, however, Minfilia turned her head slightly and looked at Wilred.

“You did not chance upon them by a random stroke of luck, did you, Wilred?”

While he truly was nothing more than a sheepish boy caught with his hands in the cookie jar in that very moment, he held the Antecedent’s stare rather well. He merely sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Aye. I confess—although it did start out as a genuine visit to Little Ala Mhigo to catch up with everyone. Imagine my surprise when those two pulled me aside once my friends departed.”

Minfilia turned back to look at Papalymo properly now, the Scion nodding at her to confirm the former Brave’s words. “It is not surprising that the Griffin’s words reach quite many of the younger ones; it is as if he knows precisely what lies at the bottom of every displaced youth’s heart. And where the grand speech does not reach the older ones, he instead appeals to freeing or avenging those left behind. Heroism only gets one so far, after all, and where one’s thirst to walk in the footsteps of heroes fades it is instead the more pragmatic, more desperate desires that are dragged to the foreground to ignite the flame of freedom… or the passion for it. I do apologise that it has taken so long for us to meet again, but we have spent quite a while watching this particular branch of the Resistance’s movements at the request of the cell that helped us after we fled Ul’dah.”

Rhalgr’s Reach—while not by far the largest group, it was the one that held one of the strategically more sound positions and often acted as intermediary between two other branches. It made the devastation it faced in the early throes of the Ala Mhigan Liberation War all the more tragic and its eventual triumph under Commander Hext all the more grand. And, of course, Rhalgr’s Reach once more fell when Black Rose swept across the Gyr Abanian front and through Ala Mhigo itself, and he suppressed a shudder as he thought about that particular version of history.

On top of their tragic ending they would very likely have to prevent the Black Rose Calamity all over again—although it ought to be significantly easier with neither Elidibus nor Emet-Selch with their hands on the trigger.

“I understand,” Minfilia said and nodded. “Were I in your position, I would likely have chosen the same. But tell me, my friends… how fare you other than your involvement with the Resistance? _Yda,_ in particular. You look quite different from what I heard.”

“Yda” flinched.

Papalymo sighed. “Observant as always, Antecedent; there is a reason why most people respect you as much as they fear you. It is genuinely heartening to see that the Crystal Brave situation has not chipped too much of that away. Aye. She looks quite different because she does not quite happen to be ‘Yda’.”

“I-I… I am… Lyse. Lyse Hext.” She bowed quickly, hot embarrassment plain on her face. She took a deep breath and shook her head. “I… I do apologise for lying like that. I… she… her death… it was… too much. Not with all her dreams unfulfilled. So I hid in her shadow, and Papalymo helped me cover up what else remained. But I could no longer hide in her and Papalymo’s shadow when… when the Resistance saved us and….”

“Asked how Yda Hext would have survived without informing her fellows,” Minfilia finished the sentence, and Lyse hung her head.

“Aye. So I… told them the truth.”

Meteor tensed once again; the events were still rather different from what they remembered them being. The Exarch, too, had to admit that this change was minor but rather strange. With Baelsar’s Wall looming over the horizon most of the changes could significantly alter the outcome or even the premise of those events.

And one pillar to fall usually meant that something further down changed rather strangely in ways they could not quite predict—the Eye, Emet-Selch’s insane theory about the supposed dead walking about handing it out like All Saints’ Wake candy notwithstanding, came to mind. Perhaps Lyse admitting her true identity this early meant that something at Baelsar’s Wall was due to go horrendously wrong. The Exarch stared at Papalymo in particular once his train of thought reached that point.

A heavy loss for the Scions and for Lyse specifically. A loss that not only kickstarted Lyse’s determination to see her homeland saved but also a sacrifice necessary to keep Shinryu from laying waste to Black Shroud and Gyr Abania both… and a sacrifice necessary to see the selfsame Primal all but delivered to Ala Mhigo’s Royal Menagerie for the climax of Zenos yae Galvus’ obsession with the perfect prey to hunt. It had made him vulnerable enough for Meteor to wrest a victory from him in the end; while they were not too keen on killing people at that point, they were still a Slayer of Eikons.

He shot Meteor a slightly worried glance; a glance they missed because they were giving Wilred and Lyse a smile that was both genuine yet crooked at the same time. 

“I reckon Wilred here knew _that_ as well?” They laughed when the Ala Mhigan took a step back in surprise. “You’re good at getting to the bottom of things on accident, aren’t you? In any case, it is good to both meet you and see you again, Lyse. Disguised or not, you’re one of us—and I for one am looking forward to meeting _you_ in this case rather than your version of your late sister.”

Their words apparently hit their marks dead centre; Papalymo raised an eyebrow, Lyse’s eyes went wide and even Wilred let out a surprised small noise. Whatever those three had been expecting to hear from the Warriors of Light, it appeared as if quiet and friendly acceptance had not been on their list of reactions.

The Exarch sighed and shrugged. “You seem surprised, yet you unquestionably accept that we have not so much as given you our names. It would be rather hypocritical of us to not accept you. It is good to see you again, Papalymo, and here’s to continued good work, Lyse.”

“Yes, nice to meet you, Lyse!” a new voice quipped up, and the Exarch turned slightly and nodded to Ryne.

Papalymo meanwhile crossed his arms. “So, what do you think, Speaker? You always seemed quite versed in speeches.”

Lahabrea, just behind Ryne, sighed and shook his head. “Whoever this Griffin is, they certainly have a way with words. Bold, meaningful words meant to light a fire of revolution in the masses that have been kept down and quiet for much too long. And either a deliberate lack of acknowledgment that such a path is arduous, as if to ensure the fires of revolution turn to a wild blaze of despair in the face of failure. Or, in simpler terms… once met with impending failure, the people will be liable to turn to prayer. A prayer for victory, for salvation.”

Unukalhai exhaled. “As Riol reported, there have been several caches of crystals that have been going missing recently. Given that the Alliance has yet to report any resurgences of Primals and a suspicious lack of the Warriors of Darkness slaying said Primals before us, something that did not quite add up before now adds up much too dangerously for my liking.”

And it was Ryne herself who, after nodding to Lyse and Papalymo, turned to Wilred. “It would certainly not be the first time that an Ala Mhigan has been enticed into calling forth a Primal to drive out the Garleans. We were able to stop Wilred and the younger ones of Little Ala Mhigo on time, but this…?”

The young man in question scratched the back of his neck.

The Exarch could not help but snort out a small laugh. “Ah, I believe I understand this chain of events now. You returned home to check on your friends and family. Said friends and family were either on board with the Griffin’s bold words or claimed that only tragedy awaited them. Your curiosity piqued, you went to listen to one such speech and realised that the words chosen were similar to yours once upon a time, and then ran into Papalymo and Lyse at the selfsame event. Sharing the same sentiment, those the two of them likely took you to the Resistance cell they work with—which would explain your longer than anticipated absence.”

“Guilty as charged, Exarch,” Wilred said without so much as a hint of shame on his face.

The sparks of rebellion in every Ala Mhigan’s heart were not a bad thing. The Exarch had counted on the selfsame sparks of defiance to see his plan to save the First and the Source both—and the first people at the base of the Crystal Tower did certainly not lack for defiance once the blind fear passed after he reassured them that he would do all he could to keep his fellow survivors safe. He knew that only a group of people with the will to succeed would eventually succeed, and the grand majority of the people within and without Gyr Abania longed for the freedom they had overthrown their mad king for.

It was too bad about how easily such things were exploited, and by one of their countrymen no less. Ilberd’s passion for his country’s freedom was an all-consuming blaze that was unsettlingly short-sighted and violent—Lyse’s passion for Ala Mhigo by comparison had been no less ferocious but a lot more focused on a future where all people of Gyr Abania could share their beloved home with one another as far as possible.

Many people would have called her letting the Tempered into the meeting short-sighted given previous incidents, but Lyse’s vision of Gyr Abania included those Ananta as well as everyone else. And by all means, she had tried to keep it as safe as possible; she could not have known there were Tempered amongst her own men.

“There… there is something about the Griffin that bothers me,” Ryne said quietly.

Much to everyone’s surprise, it was the unusually timid-sounding Lyse who spoke next. “I cannot say for certain but… he sounds like _Ilberd,_ does he not? Well, his doppelgänger in any case.”

“I thought I was imagining that,” Wilred and Minfilia said nearly at the same time—Minfilia knew better by this point, of course, but Wilred’s confusion was genuine.

For a moment they all stood there in quiet confusion and worry.

Hythlodaeus dispersed that by clapping his hands together and beaming at all of them. “Mysteries over mysteries, but lest we forget—we are sort of still standing beside the bloody Sunken Temple of Qarn in the middle of a bright, hot, truly desert-like day. Perhaps we had best take this conversation back to Little Ala Mhigo, or better yet, back to the Rising Stones. Assuming of course that, ah, Lyse and Papalymo I believe? Assuming of course they can message their Resistance fellows and tell them where they are going.”

* * *

“You certainly are an odd bunch,” Papalymo wound up laughing once the Exarch finished explaining Hythlodaeus and Unukalhai’s presence. “But I understand why neither Comet nor Seer were mentioned beforehand now.”

He grinned into his cup and shrugged.

Once again, the Rising Stones were lively in a way that reminded him of the Crystarium in the best possible ways. A cluster of young Ala Mhigans had formed—Arenvald, Wilred and Minfilia all excitedly talking about how happy they were that Lyse was back and with Alphinaud in that cluster as well mentioning that her actions were touching in a sense but that he was just as pleased to have her no longer hiding her face. Ryne, Thancred, Elidibus and F’lhammin were talking about something or other as well. Y’shtola and Krile had yanked Unukalhai and Lahabrea aside to urgently discuss something in regards to Primal nature from what it sounded like—Lahabrea was known as someone who had studied it for a while and since “Comet” was one of the people had worked with, Krile had grabbed the boy as well. And in the back room, judging from the cheering, Meteor, Hythlodaeus, Emet-Selch and the rest of the Scions as well as the Doman children were having quite a time with their mock battle. Not that Emet-Selch was involved. Oh no, the Exarch could see him leaning against the wall with his arms crossed and constantly shaking his head and very likely rolling his eyes as well. 

All that was missing were Urianger and Alisaie; with Elidibus and the Warriors of Darkness suddenly removed from the equation to a certain degree, Urianger had yet to truly emerge from the Waking Sands and Alisaie had not made her disastrous entry into the history books quite yet.

Yet for some reason he found himself wondering what Nero Scaeva of all people in this realm were doing. His involvement in the Baelsar’s Wall and Shinryu situation had been integral to not having Gyr Abania and the Black Shroud torched and kept the Garleans confused for long enough that the Alliance could make contact with the Resistance as Rhalgr’s Reach thanks to Lyse and M’naago. Doubtlessly the man was still searching for Omega and may have found it already, but… was the Eye truly in the hands of Ilberd? Was there a reason for Omega to be roused after all?

He hated the uncertainty after having spent 100 years wondering whether he was going to succeed or not.

“Many people say that too many cooks spoil the broth, but none of us were ever going for a digestible soup,” he said to Papalymo with a grin and as flat a tone as he could manage to get his sarcasm across. “Sometimes something truly acidic might just do the trick as well as a good soup after all. And trust me when I say that both Comet and Seer are outstanding at producing vile poison.”

“That, my friend, sounds positively unhinged and concerning,” Papalymo laughed. “But at the same time reassuring, somehow.”

Loud clattering and laughter from the back room made most conversation in the main hall stop for a moment, and Tataru sighed before pushing herself off her desk and marching on over to the back room clearly intending to scold the skin off everyone holding a mock battle indoors so recklessly.

Minfilia stopped her, however, and turned the conversation the Ala Mhigans and Alphinaud were having to what Tataru had done in Ishgard while the Scions had been scattered.

“It is good to be back.”

The Exarch, knowing full well that in the original timelines Papalymo always perished in the line of duty not long after this sort of meeting, managed to smile as he watched Hythlodaeus nearly miss crashing into Emet-Selch, which in turn turned into an argument between the two of them while Meteor merely slammed a hand into their face and shook their head at the bickering.

“It is good to have you back, Papalymo, truly.”


	64. ACT IX: The Wall that Fate Scaled, Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> author's cheap "i'm not clairvoyant" excuse:
> 
> this chapter was planned and even started before the patch, so uh. the weird aligning of Certain Things here is entirely coincidental and it leaves me confused as fuck all
> 
> narrative in the chapter is supposed to be jumpy for the record

To put it mildly, he was shocked that it had taken them _this long_ to finally yank the chains Elidibus had put on them early on. So was the choice to bring forward the complaint that they were starting to worry that this was against their lord’s desire. What did not surprise him, however, was the fact that they all but surrounded him nigh immediately the second he returned to the Rift.

Compared to the elusive and often unresponsive Elidibus and the notorious loner Emet-Selch, Lahabrea often was the one scouring shard after shard after shard with naught but a trail ablaze left behind him. Likewise it was him normally shepherding the newly ascended ones around; something that had gone from a minor bother to an immensely loathed task of his the more years started being between the now and the Sundering. With some time away from his post he had started to realise that the unfortunate implication here was that against all odds he had grown weary of a task that had once brought him joy. Not that he truly considered the Ascended a replacement for even a single student at Akademia Anyder, but boiled down to its very basic elements he effectively had had his fill of teaching for a lifetime.

Few went by their title still, the more catchy and descriptive ones like Architect and Emissary still in use. Deudalaphon was hardly a Secretary any longer; there was nothing to keep track of that Elidibus did not handle and that Emet-Selch had not stacked to the high heavens to collapse at a moment’s notice. She had been assigned as Emmerololth’s partner and had been near immediately discarded by the ever-fickle Keeper—while she did not outwardly blame herself for Emmerololth’s subsequent demise at the hands of Echo-blessed mortals and the Primal Eureka, there way no way of knowing what was going on in her head.

Lahabrea, meanwhile, thought he had a good grasp on it now.

The restless shuffling, the inability to truly hold still, and now the defiantly set jaw as she held his long, blank stare. For someone normally so meek as the Secretary, this Ascended certainly held out longer than most of her brethren. Long enough for Lahabrea to let out a sigh—something that the other Ascians certainly did not expect him to do, and finally unnerved Deudalaphon.

“Lest you forget, we but recently suffered the loss of not only one but _five_ seats. Igeyorhm, Nabriales, Emmerololth, Mitron and Loghrif’s absence is—”

“Fixable,” Fandaniel interrupted with a scowl on their face. “If only _someone_ allowed us to search for suitable replacements.”

Involuntarily, his mind wandered back to Ishgard. To the Brume, specifically, to a soul that glinted like glass held into the sun at the edge of his mauled aethervision. He raised a hand to cover the invisible, aching and throbbing now but no longer volatile wound. It was no secret that Speaker Lahabrea was not in the best condition. And while he was much improved now compared to before, he was but a candle flickering in the wind rather than the wildfire he had once been. While those five had recently met their demise, Lahabrea had come dangerously close to being the sixth as far as these Ascended knew.

“Fixable,” he repeated slowly, a strange tone to his voice that he had not heard in a long time. Amaurotine sounded strange and alien to any one Sundered soul, and even those ‘blessed’ with the Echo did not entirely understand the finesse that one had to speak Amaurotine with. They understood, of course, despite the foreign words that rolled strangely off their tongues—but they lacked _understanding._ “Another handful soldiers in the line of duty that should have never been, more like.”

A line of duty that, by all means, had been his creation. Wrought by his own hands.

He had not stopped long enough to think about it. Pushed the thought away whenever it arose. But as he was forced to slow down, as he had to listen time and time again to all this useless conversation that others made either to be polite or because they _genuinely_ seemed to _care,_ as ridiculous as that notion was, it caught up to him. What were the Ascended if not—as the Warrior of Light had to crudely put it when talking about events that had not come to pass—coke for the furnace? Fodder for the Rejoining. Raised in hopes of being at least somewhat adequate replacements for the people they once were, all tainted by the lives they lived and could never hold up the candle to the gone; then best used to further His cause.

His cause… the Unsundered’s cause. Salvation… salvation was not….

Beyond _them._

But… who were _they?_ It was ever the whisper that accompanied him even as he ignored familiar voices, familiar souls turn to monsters he himself formed just as he had given form to Zodiark Himself.

A dull, hammering presence nearly swallowed his senses; but Lahabrea shook it off and instead turned to return the pointed stares the Ascended were giving him. Did they even _truly_ point in them truly remembering? Each and every single sundered soul lived myriad pointless, quaint, short lives ad infinitum, the cycle of rebirth claiming each and every single soul from what the Source called Spoken and Beastman to yes, even the Ascended. And yet they still yearned for things they did not remember, tried to retread paths over and over and _over,_ turning in circles for myriad pointless, quaint, short lives ad infinitum. 

And yet the Sundered had the _gall_ to speak of their hopes for futures they would never get to see. 

“Very well. Assume I let you search for ones to fill the empty seats and you indeed find such individuals. What then? I have no intention of overriding Elidibus’ orders of standing back for the time being. So you inevitably do whatever it is you do—which is disobeying orders—and get yourselves or your new old comrades slaughtered in the process.” 

Deudalaphon took a step back at that, doubt clouding her expression as she curled her hands into fists. Fandaniel meanwhile crossed their arms, a scowl still on their face. Pashtarot and Altima, who had been surprisingly quiet the entire time, reacted with a downcast gaze and a thoughtful hum. Halmarut stretched out one hand and stared at the claws adorning her gloves. The Sundered could be so surprisingly short-sighted when it came to things affecting the present or the immediate future. Which… now that he thought about it was what the Amaurotines had excelled at. 

“But we—” 

“Mind you,” Lahabrea swiftly cut Fandaniel off, “it was _clear disobedience_ that saw Nabriales, Emmerololth and Igeyorhm slain, as investigations have since revealed. And further clear disobedience was what saw Mitron and Loghrif not only dead but also placed the entire shard they had been working on in jeopardy.” 

“So you would call us incapable of following orders or _incompetent?”_ Altima asked, her tone level and neutral as ever but her tense posture giving away that she was less than pleased about this conversation and the way it was going.

Lahabrea shook his head. “Not incompetent, no. Incapable of following orders? On occasion. _Overeager,_ however? Very much so. And the fault for that overeagerness is not your own.” He had their attention now. “The fault for that lies with me.”

After all, he was without doubt the one who found and ascended them one and all. Between Emet-Selch being a loner and Elidibus being a recluse, there really only had ever been him forging forward and dragging the presumably useless yet useful pieces of the other members of the Convocation along with him. After all, they all made the same oath.

The oath to save Amaurot, no matter the cost.

An innocent promise turned into a mad mantra.

The dull throb that threatened to swallow him whole—Zodiark’s influence, trying to yank him back into rhyme and reason—returned with a vengeance, and Lahabrea winced ever so slightly. Stronger and recovered though he was, he was still weak compared to his once strength. And as effortless as calling forth Phoenix had likely looked to the Warrior of Light, Elidibus had immediately pointed out the glaring differences between the original design and the current one. Lahabrea himself had noticed how the all-consuming flames had wavered and then immediately gone out the moment the phoenix had landed again. The dull colours that Elidibus had pointed out had been a backhanded reminder that Lahabrea still lacked his true strength. 

“You do not quite speak the way you would normally,” Halmarut said quietly, her lips pressed together into a thin line. “Are you quite… alright, Lahabrea?” 

“Hmph.” It was Pashtarot, crossing his arms with a sneer. “You speak as soft as always—he sounds not like Lahabrea at all.”

“Are you quite certain of that? He has a point in regards to our recent losses… and lest you forget, both Nabriales and Igeyorhm were technically under his supervision.” Altima now, tapping a finger against her face with a quizzical expression. “Would you not accept the blame for your subordinates failing to follow your orders and perishing because of it?” 

“Tsk.” Deudalaphon, face scrunched up in what Lahabrea could only call ‘disgust’. “Smite me though he might for this; he has never accepted blame for anything. It was ever the Sundered, the Ascended—but never him, Unsundered.”

Fandaniel merely gave him a challenging glare, as if to dare him into indeed smiting Deudalaphon for those bold words. And shockingly enough, once upon a time he may have incinerated all of them where they stood; it was clear that they, too, thought the same. The tension in the Rift may well have sundered another world with how thick it was, yet Lahabrea did not find it in him to even remotely challenge them. He did not _want_ to challenge them either once he thought about it rationally. 

They were technically supposed to be allies.

Servants of His will.

A will that Lahabrea pushed against like a drowning man. He winced once more when a jolt shot through him and he raised a hand to his head. Despite their boldness, most of the Ascended took a step backwards. From the way the energy churned around them, it would seem as if Halmarut was preparing a spell to swiftly carry them away should the need arise.

“You need not open a passage to flee, Healer,” he sighed out and dropped his hand. “In danger of sounding like the Emissary when I should not—let us reconvene at a later point.” 

Agreeing mumbling broke out, not uncommon among the Ascended. But it was Halmarut, voice as soft as ever, who put a hand on her cheek and tilted her head. “On one condition.”

Part of him wanted to laugh and ask if they fancied themselves capable of using their numbers to their advance like cowards would, but Lahabrea shrugged.

“State your terms, Healer, and perhaps I shall entertain them.”

“No. No entertaining. You agree to my term and you will get your later reconvening—you disagree and you will find your speaking room devoid of any of us. You will speak the truth, Speaker. Five questions, one for each of us, and you must answer them with naught but the truth. Zodiark be our witness.” 

Once upon a time, Elidibus would have had to be the witness in these events. How fitting, then, that the very deity of their own making used an Emissary as its heart.

“Zodiark be our witness,” he returned the oath and stepped away.

* * *

“—genuinely do not know why you are kicking up such a fuss over a nickname. Would you rather I called him Bart, short for Bartholomew?”

A shrug. A furious hiss, and some more words that he completely ignored. The Warrior of Light seemed genuinely nonplussed as to why Emet-Selch was angry, but Lahabrea had to admit that he could not care less. While he had thought it would be best to pass time here to contemplate his choices, it seemed that most of everyone had chosen this exact moment to kick up a fuss. It was not only the Warrior of Light and Emet-Selch—the Oracle of Light and the little Warrior of Light were having an animated discussion about something or other, and the Exarch was trying to fix a power line of sort that had broken with the Seer hot on his trail.

Wordlessly, he stood up and departed.

No one really even paid mind to his sudden and swift departure. Not that he minded.

* * *

Shadowless—a name they had earned throughout many history books thanks to the fact that they lacked a body yet did not fall into the same hardened aetherial state that other bodiless souls inevitably fell into unless their souls were returned to the Lifestream. Those with the Echo would see them, of course; entities without solid forms and therefore shadowless to their eyes. An omen at best, certain death at worst.

What exactly had brought him to this place as he thought he knew not, but he knew that not one Sundered here would see him. He was shadowless as he was right now. It was how he watched and waited, ready to pounce on the next body merely a fraction of time after discarding the last. Dull, distant, _unfriendly_ pulling at him served as a reminder he was not entirely of free will. As much freedom as Elidibus claimed time and time again Zodiark gave them, how different He and Hydaelyn were in the end, there was no denying Primal nature. 

Perhaps he had not so much outrun the guilt as Zodiark had covered it, numbed it, washed it away that he might serve.

Static shock sparked through him. Blasphemous, part of him howled; the truth, finally the truth, another part cried.

He was _aware._ Painfully so. He had acted without fear of repercussion, but the longer he thought about it the more he started realising that this spiral of Rejoinings would inevitably lead to the same conclusion. 

Should they ever earn the return of those souls that made up Zodiark, there was no way that those people would have looked at them as anything but horrendous murderers that needed to be cast out. Heinous, the Antecedent had called it; with her own voice rather than that of the Word of the Mother. Perhaps begun in earnest desire and understandable as a choice, but it the end result did not justify the means used to reach it.

He had to admit, he felt violently ill. He was dazed.

And at the edge of his vision blinked this shard of Mitron’s soul.

That by itself did not banish even the daze and the distant pull of Zodiark as suddenly as it did in the end.

No, the Elezen bastard that part of Mitron had been born as was still as uninteresting as the Sundered were. What caught his attention and shocked him into stillness was one specific other child in the mix. Not that the child itself was anything but yet another Sundered child with too short a life ahead of it. While reconstruction had begun in earnest and had seen most residents of the Brume granted employment and all of them given at least some proper clothing, these children were clearly marked by having grown up under such rough circumstances.

But it was not the child itself that caught his attention.

Where Mitron’s soul blinked like the sun reflected on the ocean, this one’s soul was a constant, pale shimmer. As if one were to view the moon through a thin layer of fog. And there only was one person in Amaurot with a soul such as that—to the point that several visitors from other cities blessed with any level of aethersight commented on it once they were given the seat. 

Loghrif.

Across so many shards, across so many lives, most of the times he found either of them they were always together in some way. Teacher and student. Parent and child. Lovers, friends, perhaps even the almost comical configuration of sworn rivals, family. Mitron and Loghrif were never parted, and he did not know why seeing this in particular felt like someone had delivered a kick to his chest. He had seen it countless times.

Perhaps it was due to the realisation that those unfortunate creatures were… neither beyond salvation nor were they creatures after all.

The Antecedent had challenged him at every turn—her words may have been clumsy at times and she had often spoken out of ignorance, but even though she herself clearly placed herself opposite his beliefs she listened just as well as she countered him. But one thing she insisted upon vehemently was the fact that the cycle of rebirth may have indeed looked like a cheap parody of life to the Unsundered, yet it offered the souls of the world ample chance to do whatever they wanted the next time around.

Even a failed life had a meaning; even the seemingly meaningless could touch another with greater meaning. How many nobodies became nightmares? How many adored leaders vanished into obscurity? But it was thanks to this cycle of rebirth and their short lives that they got to try again and again and again, even if they themselves did not realise that they were retreading their own paths. Life after life in an endless spiral, but even the most atrocious of mortals earned a chance to live a better, less bitter life afterwards.

Oh, heavens.

He had treated the very people he had sworn to save as expendable. Every fleck of aether of his had been dedicated to salvation, yet on the grand scale he had forgotten that each and every single mangled soul was still a soul from before the Sundering. Zodiark had made him forget just as he buried any doubts he may have had out of sheer despair. All the finger-pointing towards the end, the cornering of the former Seer—and yet he had done exactly as Venat accused him of doing after the Sundering.

Strained, wheezing laughter escaped him as he raised a hand to put on his face. Once more covering the hole in his aethersight as he begged these children to get lost—only for Loghrif’s glimmering soul to pull Mitron’s blinking one along, mortal laughter ringing through his ears like thunder threatening to blow out his eardrums.

While Zodiark was not conceived as a devil He was still Primal in nature. A distant voice likely belonging to the Warrior of Light told the tale of a child, straining against its Tempering, holding out in quiet solitude while the Primal whispered longingly for it to listen to none but the Primal. And right now, Lahabrea could swear after hundreds upon thousands, millions, myriad, countless beyond both mortal and his own reckoning years, he heard quiet, sweet, promising whispering. There were people to save. Loghrif and Mitron were right there, he but needed to return them to their former glory and things could proceed apace—did he not yearn to smite that Warrior of Light and their Scion accomplices one and all, after all? They had humiliated him, they had humiliated the one who had sworn to bring the very world to its knees if only it would save his people.

Lahabrea did not even know when he had slammed his hands over his ears. But there they were now, inefficient as ever. The Speaker’s oath was to work for the good of Amaurot and the star, a steward. Not a harbinger of death. But Amaurot had fallen, it was gone, and only his hands could restore it now. He but needed to sew these mangled souls back together, against the bearer’s wills. Save them. Save the star. He had to. He had to—

“I _knew_ something was wrong.”

The voices of himself and Zodiark fell silent immediately when shadowless, weightless hands pried his hands off his ears.

While not many traces of whatever mortal life they lived remained, there was a strange look on her face that did certainly not belong onto Halmarut’s face as she kept an almost iron grip on his trembling hands.

“Those are… Loghrif and Mitron, are they not?”

“Yes,” he whispered, his mouth dry. He almost wanted to thank her for shutting his own voice and His voice out of his head for the moment, but he did no such thing.

“You are not going to pursue them and ascend them, are you.” It was not a question, but he slightly shook his head. Halmarut nodded. “… Good. I would have had to stop you in that case. But I am relieved that I will not have to use force. I was merely sent to ask you to return—yet I cannot help but wonder… are you even in a state where you can answer our questions after all?”

He closed his eyes with a long, drawn-out sigh. Halmarut let go of his hands at long last, and Lahabrea let them drop back to his sides.

“… Forget your questions. I shall tell you… everything. Why you have been asked to remain where you are. What Elidibus, Emet-Selch and I have been doing in the meanwhile. Smite me though He might for this, and while this is too late an admission by any means, you deserve no less than the truth.”

* * *

To put it mildly, he was shocked that there was not an immediate outrage that swept through the Ascended. Doubt, perhaps, but as they stuck their heads together Pashtarot muttered that it would align with how strange Elidibus started acting from one day to the next and the surge of energy that seemed to go against all reasoning when the Crystal Tower reappeared. While a useful tool and therefore dismissed as not important until further notice, something about that surge had been decidedly odd but with the holding orders no one had been able to investigate in the aftermath of Lahabrea’s failure and the subsequent search for him—before the Warrior of Light’s sudden appearance they had all simply been too busy to look into the Crystal Tower.

Fandaniel immediately seemed to argue that any and all of this sounded _insane,_ going as far as turning back to stare at Lahabrea for a moment and then faltering once it was clear that Lahabrea had no intention of reacting to any accusations. After a while, Halmarut put a hand on her cheek and tilted her head with a concerned look into his direction.

“Frankly, it sounds just as insane as the world having been sundered. Yet we know for a fact that the Sundering was an event that took place. And he himself, if his story holds true, would very much be in our boat of having to believe such things. And he does, evidently.”

Altima was the next to look up again, a pointed displeased tension on her face as she shook her head. “Dull and dim though these memories are, there… distantly… there must have been some sort of research into temporal distortions even back before the Sundering.”

He inhaled slowly. “A research team under the Silencer which in fact included aforementioned Silencer. Echoes of such continued to persist amongst… every Nabriales to take his place since. Yet none succeeded. Know that I speak the truth, however—I have in fact beholden the very mechanisms and verified their integrity. While the tower itself will not be capable of going anywhere again any time soon, it has in fact jumped twice beforehand. Machine wear suggests as much.”

They all turned back to look at him now, different shades of confusion or plain displeasure on their faces while Lahabrea fought off the onset of a headache.

Being here for too long was dangerous. A Primal could not understand that its followers might be trying to save it—and while Zodiark let them do as they pleased as long as it was in the name of ‘salvation’, there was absolutely no way that He would let them continue for much longer with parts of their free will intact if Lahabrea did not choose his next words carefully. For once part of him almost wished for the crushing, empty silence that had accompanied them for so long.

“… Make no mistake. I have no intention of abandoning our… my mission. But as things stand for the time being, it is on hold to take care of a greater issue. Salvation is ever what we strove for—the salvation of the world. If such includes working _with_ our erstwhile opponents for a while, so be it.” Sacrifices must be made, he did not say. It seemed in poor taste, having just revealed what he had. How ironic that he would remember what it was like to choose words poorly now after having spent aeons doing naught but reminding these Ascended that they were lesser.

Deudalaphon was the next to scowl. “If you permit the bold question—why would He allow one Elidibus to slay another?”

The Tempering was the same, part of him wanted to say.

Then again, Zodiark had been silent for so long, Lahabrea was starting to doubt that He had even noticed. His headache was getting worse, and he grimaced. “I cannot say for certain. Principles of time travel and the effects interfering with what has already happened escape my seat—but I reckon that, at the base, Elidibus is Elidibus, no matter the lived experience.”

A blatant lie if he had ever told one. While it was a process slow in the making, the changes were obvious to him now especially when it came to Elidibus. Ruthlessly willing to do anything for balance at worst and analytical but neutral at best, Elidibus very evidently had ever been a voice of reason as his seat demanded. And while he had risen to the occasion in less than agreeable conditions at what most perceived as the end of the world, he had immediately taken over his duties with a certain calm that few found in those turbulent times. The Tempering, clearly, but Elidibus had been a worthy successor to the point that even the reluctant and elusive former Fourteenth hissed out that Ophion taking the seat was not the issue that had made him leave in the end. But now, parts of Elidibus that had not quite surfaced since he took the title, cracked through. While still willing to do anything for balance, it seemed as if his conscience had started to reform. He was observant in ways that targeted both his side and the opponent’s side once more, rather than being blind to what was going on with his own allies. He had admitted as much with a sigh one quiet evening, claiming that if he had but looked closer then his timeline’s Lahabrea and Igeyorhm would not have had to die such wasteful, horrendous deaths. Nabriales and Emmerololth, Mitron and Loghrif would have survived their own folly too had he but watched _closer._

Of course, the Ascended did not entirely know that. He was not going to tell them; he had already said too much. While the Ascended muttered amongst themselves once again, Lahabrea raised both hands to the sides of his head. He was not quite sure what he was trying to achieve there—but he begged Him to cease this instant for he was not working against Him.

If _this_ was but one half of the _agony_ that Gerun went through every time he opposed Hydaelyn and Zodiark, Lahabrea did not _want_ to imagine how _painful_ any one of these deaths was. And even so, this was likely not one half. Reasonably, this was more of one quarter of the pain that Gerun went through.

“—brea! Lahabrea!”

He snapped his eyes open again—and the pain immediately dissipated. Once more it was Halmarut, worry plain on her face as she looked at him. The other Ascended also looked mildly disturbed or concerned on different levels.

Like a gathered group of children running amok through Anyder and getting caught in some sort of mischievous game by a member of the Convocation.

“You were groaning as if you were in pain. Are you _certain_ you have recovered from your ordeals at the hands of the Warriors of Light?”

In the past, Halmarut had not been behind quite literally tying people to a resting place if they refused to accept the Healer’s advice. While she had never quite done the tying herself—she left that to Altima—most people relented before the Healer could get to this point.

Lahabrea shook his head. “Nothing to concern yourself with. Those injuries have healed, but as ever, duty but means you will be collecting another injury or seven along the way if you stay in the field. And that is precisely why we unanimously agreed to keep you from said field. As Elidibus reports, several of you were at least severely mauled by one mortal further down the timeline—something that the Warrior of Light from his timeline confirms as true. Rather than leave you as prey ready for the picking, we would have you stay put.”

Then again, he had overheard some things.

And there was still the matter of the Warriors of Darkness that concerned Elidibus and the Warrior of Light in particular. Those five were in desperate need of a reason to either be exterminated—or to be sent home to the First, where they could work together to undo the damage they had wrought. But a Warrior of Light was not capable of stopping a Flood of Light.

Just as the Paragons of Darkness had been unable to do more than watch a Flood of Darkness in utter horror.

“… I genuinely do not like this look on you,” Deudalaphon said. “It is something much more suited to Emet-Selch or Elidibus, but this… is mildly unsettling to see on _you.”_

He snorted. Once upon a time, Deudalaphon would have said the same thing about an expression of someone lost in deep thought on Emet-Selch’s face. But the Sundering had… changed things. And he had finally slowed down enough to recognise those changes as such now. Whether he liked it or not was a question he had not quite faced yet.

“There is however a matter that you might be able to assist with. The First, on the brink of a Flood of Light.”

This was direct interference, and Lahabrea recognised it as such. But matters on the Source dictated that there was no Word of the Mother whisking away the Warriors of Light to halt the advance of the Flood in their soon-to-be fallen home. Meaning that there was an Empty in the making right next to the Void, and while he still felt that tremor of horror from her as he dug his hands into the aether that made up Igeyorhm’s soul he also knew that no matter how many times she was ascended, she always remembered and broke under the weight of the Thirteenth. While he had no intention of even _looking_ at those pieces of Loghrif and Mitron in the Brume any longer, he also did not wish for them to eventually be ascended and remember what they had wrought.

“If you so crave action, go and raise Warriors of Darkness. Stop the Flood of Light, and see what has been destroyed by it restored.” He closed his eyes. “The last thing we need for the Rejoinings is another empty shard.”

Fandaniel shrugged, muttering something about this being better than rotting away in boredom. Pashtarot sighed in defeat, saying that if this one was going, a babysitter was needed. Halmarut turned around, immediately saying that neither of them was going without a healer, and Deudalaphon and Altima joined in with a claim that maybe some people with the time to think about plans were needed as well in that mess.

The headache was subsiding—the urge to throw up in peace once those five left again however was on the rise.

The sooner they finished all this _hero_ business and went back to being on opposing sides, the better.

Then again, would he really be able to return to his usual work schedule after all of this? No matter how many times Zodiark dulled the sensation, Lahabrea now was keenly aware of what he had done.

Salvation was not beyond _them._ But perhaps it was beyond _him._

And no amount of honey-laced lies whispered in his ears by Primals could erase the fact that he had slaughtered the very people he had sworn to save.


	65. INTERLUDE XI: Names taken, Pasts given

“It does seem sort of odd that the researcher would have called for a creature with the same name as… well, you know.”

“Have you anything constructive to add to the conversation, Volos, or are you done spouting baseless conjecture?”

While they were not friends by any means, somehow, somewhere along the line of duty, they had somehow wound up glued together by the hip. She was not quite sure she liked it, especially given that their personality was disagreeable even on good days. But Altima was not liable to run from a fellow member of the Convocation, especially during so crucial a time.

“Come now, Spica, not even _you_ could ignore something like that.”

Of course she could not. She was the Chronicler, after all—and she had already done her due duty and gone through several historical documents that dealt with Flareseeker names and deities in particular.

She let out a long sigh and turned to face Fandaniel. “Now, were I more into baseless, idle chatter and pointless gossip, yes. I would be going about it the same way that you are, Destroyer. You ought to change your name to Gossiper because that is what you do not only on Convocation time but also in your spare time rather than focus on our very pressing issues. Anyway.” Altima waved a hand through the air and shoved herself off her seat in her office and started pacing about. “The events were as follows: following a disturbance at Akademia Anyder, starting from the depths of the Words of Lahabrea that resulted in the entire building being evacuated while our Speaker remained behind and called for the Architect and the Unbeliever to help him cast our sample from the ruined regions into a cage below the Messenger’s seas, several researchers joined the Speaker in the depths. Now, this is where we lose contact with him for several days on end, to the point that not even the Unbeliever manages to speak to him. The next thing we know is that some sort of second disturbance, this time centred around the uppermost floors of Akademia Anyder, has taken place. By the time any of your Bureau of Security arrive, the matter has been taken care of and they bear witness to a particularly baffling chain of events, as follows: a dense cloud of aetheric electricity disperses, just as the sole remaining standing person, the Speaker, collapses—and within that dispersing aether, too great for even some of the most talented mages to conjure up and control, another person is revealed; alas with injuries so grave and fire-aligned that only the Speaker could have afflicted them in an attempt to stop whatever creature they had turned into.”

Fandaniel nodded, watching her pace around with their usual scowl on their face.

“Now, as scattered reports penned in a frenzy reveal, the creature that was summoned by a top researcher under our Speaker was named ‘Quetzalcoatl’, which, as you _correctly_ state, is also our Speaker’s name. Alas, this is where your baseless conjecture and lack of general knowledge about matters not pertaining to Amaurot shines through clearly.”

“Spica—”

Altima pointed a finger at them with a triumphant grin on her face that revealed several sharp fangs as was usual for Children of Sirius like her. “It is a fairly uncommon name, yes. But! It is not solely a Flareseeker or even Bodhan name. There are several Alexandrian Steelhearts with the same name as our Speaker. And as we both know, the volcanic deity Ifrita watches over Bodhum and Alexandria in their beliefs. But no one scaled a volcanic mountain range entirely on their own—the Steelhearts and Flareseekers of eld were assisted by a Phantomologist they called Raincaller, who at his side had a creature he called Quetzalcoatl. Raincaller did just as his name suggests; he called for rain. But Quetzalcoatl at his side was a creature that brought thunder and lightning to assist its master.”

Fandaniel scowled, but from the way they furrowed their brows it was easy to tell that they were about to admit that they had been outwitted and their usual gossip had been proven wrong.

“So what you are saying is that… not only was this thing named after old folklore… but so is Lahabrea?”

“Precisely so, Volos. The coincidence can lead the less learned on some fun and dangerous thought trails as you so dutifully showed, but in the end it is but that. Coincidence. The researcher in question, as Lahabrea has since confirmed, was indeed one of many Steelhearts in the city. Naturally one of our scaled friends would call something meant to evoke electric energies in vast amounts ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and—going by what little we know about the cranky old man—it would seem that he was born on a rather stormy day, and his learned mother likely chose the name in honour of his Flareseeker heritage.”

A long, long sigh. Fandaniel admitted defeat, and Altima grinned at them.

“Now that this has been done, since you are already here… would you mind helping me, dear co-worker mine? There are several historical chronicles of travelling Seers that I intended to look over in search for something that might help us stop the advance of whatever it is that is devouring so much land.”

“Ugh….” While not a slacker by any means, Fandaniel was notorious for being hard to work with when it was matters not pertaining to their seat in general. And while they, much like everyone else, had spent a good amount of time working on a solution, they had been rather quick to admit that their approach was likely not correct to see a solution for the Sound’s imminent danger that was approaching the city.

She very swiftly put a seal over the door and the windows. “I changed my mind. This is not a request—you already cost me enough time with your idle chatter, Destroyer.”

“You are one cruel mistress, Chronicler.”

“Such, my dear, has ever been my seat’s duty. Now get going, that shelf over there holds the diary of the Seer Gerun who charted the flying islands alongside Lunarians when Babil and the Floating City of Tycoon had just agreed to unite under the name Floating City of Babil.”

* * *

“The number of survivors is… a much smaller margin than anticipated,” Emmerololth sighed from her seat and all but collapsed into a heap of scales and an aura of defeat. The latest victim of whatever ‘the Sound’ was had been a minor settlement of people who had already taken in several other survivors. Therefore, those people from the other continent had abandoned it altogether and requested shelter within Amaurot.

“How much of a smaller margin are we talking, Loviatar?” they asked softly. While Mitron had not come here to speak about this issue but rather to check in with something minor that had fallen through the Convocation’s discussions of late, they could very well not ignore her clear emotional distress. Emmerololth did not bring this matter up lightly—to the point people assumed she never talked about it.

Compared to the almost lanky Lahabrea whose heritage was blindingly obvious with the long, spiked at the base tail and extremely pointy horns and absurd amount of ink-black scales, Emmerololth’s heritage was harder to pin. She clearly looked Amaurotine for the most part were it not for the white scales, the flat horns and the short tail.

Another soul like so many in Amaurot whose ancestors had found their home here. And despite her being one of the prouder Amaurotines around, her voice sounded shockingly small when she spoke again. “Out of the group of survivors, already a smaller margin than one would have surmised from how massive their city had been standing at eighteen, three survived. The village’s actual inhabitants, most of whom are farmers more than anything else, they numbered roughly a thousand. Alongside the three, another twenty survived and seventeen travelled to Amaurot with the three. A thousand people and eighteen people, and yet only twenty-three total survived, Llyr.”

A comically small number compared to the sheer volume of people who lived in Amaurot. Even just a single building at times held more people than that, yet the scale was staggering once applied to Amaurot’s population. They had always admired her skill with mathematics—but in this very moment they knew that she was comparing numbers of survivors across all boards to get an average, and was applying said average to Amaurot in the worst case scenario.

Mitron stepped around her desk and, while a violation of the professional space they all agreed on as members of the Convocation, put their hands on her cheeks.

“Loviatar, Keeper Emmerololth—whatever horrific scenario your head is cooking up for you right now, I swear that none of us will allow such a thing to come to pass. You will not have to tally deaths. I swear, we are all doing what we can to prevent such a thing.”

“I… but what if—”

“No buts or what ifs. While unprecedented, I swear that the Convocation as your brothers and sisters and siblings in arms will do all we can to prevent a horrific death tally. You will not be doing any of this alone.”

She was trembling enough that they shushed her softly. At the very least that seemed to calm her slightly enough to start trembling so horrendously.

“In fact, how about you quit for the evening and instead come share dinner with me and Loghrif? The last thing your bureau needs now is you having a nervous breakdown—and as your fellow member of the Convocation, I ill wish to see you suffer so on your own.”

She stared at them for a moment with wide eyes and then closed them when they let go of her face. “B-But… will Loghrif even—”

Mitron could not help but let out a snort at that. While it had been frowned upon by the general population by the time the two of them had been given their titles, few Amaurotines dared challenging Mitron and Loghrif’s integrity based on their relationship nowadays. What most people however failed to see, just as they did with Emet-Selch and Gerun, was that most of the time they agreed despite having more than a few public spats over differences in opinion.

But one thing Mitron and Loghrif always agreed on.

It was that their fellow members of the Convocation were human just as they were. And if Loghrif knew that Mitron had sent Emmerololth to her own home in such a state or worse yet, left her at her desk like this, why, Mitron might as well have started sleeping in his aquariums rather than their bed.

“Fiachra will be pleased to see you, trust me. He did mention wanting to discuss a creation matrix both of you sought at the same time to see if its contents might help alleviate any symptoms of the Sound the other day. And I for one would be interested in hearing both of your opinions on the matter.”

Her face lit up a little at that.

* * *

Perhaps a slap had been the wrong reaction to have. But through all the ceaseless, tormenting anxiety he had racked up over the last weeks, it was a release of sorts. And what the other had been doing had been _extraordinarily_ idiotic, even for her standards.

“Miervaldis, what on—”

“Quiet, Vahagn.” All three of them were wearing their normal, everyday communal robes and masks rather than the ones that marked them as members of the Convocation of Fourteen currently on duty. Admittedly, Nabriales and Pashtarot had come across this mess a little late, but even on the brink of death he would recognise Deudalaphon—and he was not going to let her continue acting like an idiot in public, no matter how many times Pashtarot complained. “Have you anything to say for yourself, Freyja?”

She gave him a defiant glare—then dropped it just as suddenly and turned her gaze towards the pavement and shook her head. “No, I do not.”

Nabriales crossed his arms. “When I left my bureau this afternoon, I certainly did not expect to find you brawling with your fellow Amaurotine in the open like that. Pray tell, what in heaven’s name could have caused such an entanglement?”

The stress was an obvious answer. All of them were on edge—to the point that even Elidibus at times seemed at a loss as to how to dispel the arguments they all had amongst themselves. Deudalaphon’s lips were set in a thin line and she did not give him an answer.

For someone so very often called ‘songbird’ because she hummed whenever she was doing her work in a good mood, the Secretary’s silence was _deafening_ this time around. The dark expression she wore also looked more than plain wrong on her face. While not a vengeful person, something or other must have upset her enough to get into a fight bad enough that her lower had been split. And, of course, the darkening hand mark on her cheek, right under what appeared to be a black eye.

“Goodness,” Pashtarot eventually sighed out into the tense silence and put a hand on both their shoulders. “Enough of this staring contest. Miervaldis, if you do not mind—I would prefer getting Freyja to Esther. While those injuries are barely worth talking about, it will not reflect well upon the Convocation if one of ours is seen with injuries so shortly after incidents like these.”

“I do not need the Healer, Protector,” Deudalaphon hissed and finally stopped glaring at Nabriales.

He said nothing and instead turned to look at Pashtarot, who in turn deflated slightly and shook his head.

“This was not… a suggestion, Freyja. Miervaldis and I are going to take you to Esther kicking and screaming if we must—we were on our way to Akademia Anyder to speak to the Professor anyway.”

For a long moment, a quiet tension settled above the three of them. Nabriales was half prepared to use his height to his advantage to force Deudalaphon to come with them, but she relented with a sigh and shook her head.

“Fine, Vahagn. Take me to Esther, then. And tell the old man Quetzalcoatl to eat at the very least, Eirwen has been expressing some worries whenever she is not busy with her research.”

* * *

“For what it is worth, it cannot take too much longer before they find out what happened to your family, at the very least. It cannot be that hard to track Free Citizens.”

A dismissive sigh, and a shake of the head. While not officially part of the Crystarium guard, the two of them had been given proper armour and all things considered, it looked more right on Gaia than it did on her. Then again, technically speaking neither of them truly belonged in this place. Both of them ought to be back in Eulmore where they belonged.

Gaia scowled and stared at her free hand. The other one she had on her hammer. “And what if… I change my mind? What if I do not want to know who I was once?”

Ryne blinked several times.

Patrol rounds were slow, and the two of them had been assigned to the route from the Northern Staging Point to the Inviolate Witness—which commonly was called the world’s most boring place to be ever since the return of Ardbert had seen it have action once and then never again. Of course the two of them knew better than to trust the quiet with an Ascian on the loose, but Gaia and Ryne often used the time spent here to talk about things they could not truly talk about in the Crystarium.

“Well, that’s your decision in the end. None of us can force anything on you. Hells, I would love to see someone try!” She beamed at Gaia and reached for her free hand. “I am serious, for the record. I, too, was offered something similar by Chai-Nuzz once he was properly settled in his office. Something or other about reports pertaining to past Minfilias and where they had been found. He essentially offered me a chance to learn where I came from—and I refused.”

“You did?”

“Uh-huh.” Ryne nodded. “As far as I am concerned, my past that I know shaped who I am today. I am Ryne, yes, but I would not be Ryne if I had not been the Minfilia Thancred saved from the gaol in Eulmore first, and that Minfilia in her cage could not have been without the girl who was brought to Eulmore when she was too young to remember aught from before. But I cannot be that girl, and neither can I be Minfilia any longer. Anything else would be betraying who I am today. If you feel the same about the Eulmoran Free Citizen, then that is that. Not all of us can embrace our pasts as readily as others, after all. I mean,” and she let out a giggle at that, “just look at Lue-Reeq. He can leave the Eulmoran Free Citizen behind, but it does not quite leave him despite finally learning how to handle his finances. Too bad about his choice of friends with the other Cardinal Virtue hunters being what they are, eh?”

Gaia rolled her eyes.

The Wandering Stairs were quite an adventure to behold whenever the bounty hunters returned from whatever they had fished up—and one of Ryne’s favourite places to be. Even Meteor generally joined in whenever they were back on the First and whatever nonsense was going on this time was unfolding. The last time Giott and Lue-Reeq had gotten into quite an argument, which the Dwarf wanted to handle the Dwarven way—with extreme violence or alcohol—while the Mystel had audibly complained. Nothing had truly gotten them to stop screeching at one another until finally Meteor had gotten up, had grabbed them both by the collar, yanked them up and bonked their heads together.

Gaia had nearly _choked_ on her tea and her food, whereas Ryne had started howling with laughter alongside the rest of the patrons.

“Bad example,” Ryne chortled and squeezed Gaia’s hand. “I am quite serious, however. Whoever you were matters little if you do not wish to learn about it. As far as I am concerned, you are Gaia. The girl I met when we found Eden in the Empty and departed to see it restored to what it may have been like before the Flood. The Oracle of Darkness that I have been working with ever since then. The one I l—”

“Oh, get out of here with that sappy nonsense,” Gaia interrupted her and wrested her hand free from Ryne’s grasp. Of course, that did not prevent Ryne from seeing that she had gone red around the ears. “But that is… relieving to hear. That you would not mind, I mean. Now then, was there a patrol we were supposed to be on, or am I misremembering things?”

Ryne beamed at her, and Gaia returned the smile when she turned back to look at her.


	66. ACT IX: The Wall that Fate Scaled, Part 4

As most things did, it began as a morning like any other. Not those of their timeline, but one of the new timeline. A wretchedly exhausted-looking Lahabrea somehow usually found himself unable to worm out of Thancred’s morning routine, the irony not escaping any of the time travellers. Whatever concerns Ryne and Meteor in particular had had were washed away as Lahabrea kept up his role rather well, and Thancred none the wiser seemed to be rather amused by the supposed expert in aetherlogy and how little of a morning person he was. While at first things had been strange, Lyse soon found herself comfortably seated with them and the Exarch, on occasion joined by her fellow Ala Mhigans. This morning, however, Wilred and Arenvald were having an animated conversation with Minfilia and Alphinaud, the latter more relaxed than ever.

Meteor found themself rather tense for once. It was too calm.

And perhaps it was Hythlodaeus and his ominous statements about the future rubbing off on them, but they felt the tension drop off them with a sigh of relief when the doors to the Rising Stones were all but slammed open—much to the protest of one of the Seventh Heaven’s barkeepers. All Scions startled out of whatever pleasant morning conversations they were having, shocked silence holding the entire place in its grip.

“Oh, heavens—Naago!” was the cry to pierce the awkward silence, and all hell broke loose.

Krile did not even _wait_ for anyone to call for a healer, and she merely nodded at Y’shtola and held eye contact with Lahabrea for a long moment. A heartbeat later the two Scions and the Ascian all ran up to beside the Miqo’te who now started wobbling on her feet with a mild groan but still tried to reach for Lyse.

The Exarch shot them a concerned glance, and Meteor closed their eyes. Another change.

M’naago had not come here on her own this time. Indeed, a split second later a second cry cut through the sudden commotion.

“Urianger? _Alisaie?”_

“Yeah, yeah, nice to see you, long time to see, _whatever,_ we have more pressing matters on hand than a sudden reunion.” With the Warriors of Darkness not around to injure her for spying on Urianger, Alisaie was in a much less pathetic state this time around. She nodded at them from across the room, a quiet and brusque greeting after the quiet yet hopeful farewell after they had helped her taking care of what remained of Dalamud. Warm green light shone from next to her while the healers got to work with M’naago, Lyse unable to do more than crouch down and cup the Miqo’te’s face and whisper quiet encouragements to her. While Lyse would never consider it much of a difference, it clearly helped keep M’naago calm enough to let the healers do their work.

With a sigh, Lahabrea eventually got up from his position after affirming that Y’shtola and Krile had the situation under control and started scrutinising Urianger and Alisaie. The latter appeared to be scratched up but she slapped his hand away when he reached out to see if there were any worse injuries.

“M’naago took the brunt of it,” she hissed at him and the Speaker narrowed his eyes at her. “We have a situation at Baelsar’s Wall. _Possibly_ with Ascian involvement.”

“Possibly?” Minfilia asked, and while it looked like she was looking at Alisaie who was trying to squirm out of Lahabrea’s reach, but Meteor clearly saw that she was staring at the Speaker who was trying to get his hands on the teenager to patch her up properly, lest someone had the gall to accuse him of neglecting her. Urianger put a stop to the display by putting a hand on Alisaie’s shoulder—which made her wince—and nodding at Lahabrea. “Whatever do you mean?”

Elidibus had hurriedly explained that Ardbert and his fellow Warriors of Light had been sent to Baelsar’s Wall to see if there was not a way to prevent that incident from happening. He also added that Alphinaud’s twin sister had overheard the leg end of that conversation and therefore likely tracked the Warriors of the First. Urianger meanwhile had in fact been sent to the Sylphs recently to inquire whether or not the Touched Ones were trying to do anything funny again. If Alisaie and M’naago had run into him in the Black Shroud and then asked him to take them to the Rising Stones, this situation would check out.

“I cannot quite speak for… the Ascian part,” M’naago wheezed when Lyse helped her stand back up again, “but the faction of the Resistance under the Griffin was on the move. The faction contacted us of Rhalgr’s Reach requesting back-up for… an attempt to storm Baelsar’s Wall. Quite a few left, and I with them in an attempt to keep them from doing something idiotic… but the moment we were handed uniforms of the Eorzean Alliance, I… I couldn’t just stand by. I ran into Miss Alisaie on the other side of the Wall once all hell broke loose.”

“Which is, I suppose, when some Garleans decided to fire on us for being too close to the Wall. Fair. Before you ask, Alphinaud, I was there to track something related to Ascians, and that mess started moving just moments before all hell broke loose.”

“Shit,” Meteor hissed out to cut the tension up—and to get this play on the stage properly. All conjecture and no action was ever the issue the Scions this early in the timeline had had, just as the Alliance hesitated too long. “If the Griffin is bold enough to mount an assault on Baelsar’s Wall—”

“He would either have to be suicidally overconfident or have something to back him up,” Ryne continued, understanding what they were trying to get at.

Unukalhai crossed his arms. “As far as I understand, the Ascians have been laying low ever since Lahabrea was defeated at Castrum Meridianum.”

Lahabrea, finally having patched up Alisaie’s minor injuries, sighed. “Can we truly presume that the Paragons work under a united front? Perhaps there is an outlier involved. In any case, assuming that we are dealing with the worst case scenario here—the missing Eye of Nidhogg might very well have found its way to Baelsar’s Wall through one or several other ways, might it not?”

Those words truly kicked all hell loose. Wilred was called over to Papalymo’s side to _immediately_ reveal all about his erstwhile attempt to summon Rhalgr as a Primal. Honeyed words that spoke of _salvation_ and a black-robed man whose voice was both soft and sharp like a weapon at the same time—Meteor watched Lahabrea wince ever so slightly at that, raising a hand to his head and stifling a groan, a motion that was interrupted by Thancred putting both his hands on the Ascian’s shoulders and shoving him forwards, saying something or other about no time for the usual morning spiel he put up. Alisaie was loudly explaining that she had seen the white-robed Ascian that Urianger had mentioned during the short time she had been at the Waking Sands again speak to a group of adventurers that, if the reports Urianger had been sending her were correct after all, were very likely the Warriors of Darkness who had been suspicious through their sudden absence. M’naago meanwhile was finally back on her feet, just in time for Y’shtola to all but whirl around and call for Arenvald and Krile. Loud, constant chattering—which then was interrupted by Minfilia.

“Warriors of Light… might I trouble you to go ahead and ascertain the situation before we waste too much time?”

Meteor quietly shot a prayer of thanks to the bloody Fury before nodding. “Contact the Alliance. This sounds like a provocation for the Empire that will have to spur the Alliance into full defensive mode or launch a pre-emptive strike on Gyr Abania if you ask me, Antecedent.”

Minfilia understood what they meant by that. Before she could even nod at them, Ryne had made certain to teleport and Meteor and the rest followed suit.

* * *

Compared to when they had lost their lance halfway up the Wall and gone to put what Lyse had taught them so far to good use, they were completely crushing whatever Garlean opposition had the spare time to try and stop a seemingly uninvolved third party. Some of the conscripts recognised the Warriors of Light for who they were, and Meteor could not fault them for dropping their weapons and running. While the same thing had eventually happened after the liberation of Ala Mhigo, it was bizarre to see it happen this early; but then again there were eight Warriors of Light versus a single one who might or might not be on the battlefield.

And besides, they were a strange enough group to easily recognise.

Things turned from strange to stranger, however, once they reached the point where their lance had shattered and they had forewent any weapons in favour of their gauntleted fists.

It was as if lightning had struck them and the Warrior of Darkness opposite them. Ardbert stared at them slack-jawed and with wide eyes for a moment, then he shook his head and lowered the weapon. His fellows beside him followed suit and Meteor, too, lowered their sword.

It was Renda-Rae whose eyes darted back and forth, a deep scowl unfurling on her face as recognition started setting in. “Emissary,” she growled out eventually, and Elidibus bowed slowly.

“… And the other three?” Meteor had not thought about it much in recent days, but given all that had happened since they had merely forgotten—Branden had perhaps been the most threatening of this group other than Renda-Rae. He sounded _terrifying_ as he said that with a low voice and jerked his head into the general direction of the remaining Ascians.

“Emet-Selch, Gerun, Lahabrea,” Elidibus flatly replied.

Meteor and Ardbert kept staring at one another, the sudden and back then inexplicable draw they felt towards one another once more happening. This time they were fully aware of it and they knew the reason for it—and there was absolutely no denying that Elidibus’ theory of the Source soul overpowering the Shard soul in the long run was a lie, just as a more Rejoined soul would inevitably overpower one holding less shards. If they were to fight together for a while Meteor _knew_ Ardbert would vanish and rejoin them before long.

Unukalhai and Nyelbert moved almost simultaneously, one sending a spark of dark and one a ball of flame towards an approaching Garlean sky armour to knock it out of the air. Lahabrea, whose eyes had been glazed over for most of their climb, shook his head and looked around.

“The aether here _sparks_ with activity.”

Ryne and Lamitt both nodded, muttering something about it making their skin feel as if small needles were pricking them. Meteor, admittedly, did not quite feel it but they saw it on every mage’s face that all of them shared the same sensation—just as the less magically inclined Ardbert and Renda-Rae looked just as confused as Meteor was about the pricking statement.

On the other hand, knowing what they did now… activity meant that there was an abundance of umbral energies swirling about. Which in turn could only mean that somehow, somewhere, Ilberd had gotten his hands on at the very least one of Nidhogg’s eyes.

“Not good,” both they and Ardbert said at the same time—the other Warrior of Light narrowed his eyes at them, and they shrugged vaguely.

“Look,” Meteor muttered and raised their hands defensively, “I am most certainly not here to fight _you_ people. If you folks would like to stay here and have some verbal fights, go ahead, be my guests. But I will be going.”

With their part said, they drew their sword again and stormed past the Warriors of Light. Behind them they heard protests from both their party and Ardbert’s, but they did not stop to turn around and see who decided to forgo all caution to follow them. Whoever decided that they wanted to go could come keep up with them.

Vague memories of this part of Baelsar’s Wall being reported as shut down and under control by the Garleans which impeded the progress of the Scions long enough to ensure that they had to face Ilberd on their own floated up and down in the back of their head as they stormed, heavy armour clanking. Somewhere behind them were more people who were trying to keep up, and then a loud screech of metal gates being closed followed by the loud, clear blasts of some sort of Magitek weaponry being fired. It was that exact moment that they turned around to see who had not hesitated long enough to be shut out.

Surprisingly enough, all five Warriors of Light, although it seemed that Ardbert had scooped Lamitt up at some point to properly dash after Meteor. Beside them—which made Meteor raise their eyebrows—was Lahabrea bending over and gasping for breath while Ryne turned to the shut gate and wrung her hands for a moment.

The others seemed to have gotten shut out.

“It would seem the rest of your allies are on the other side,” Lamitt deadpanned at them and jumped out of Ardbert’s arms.

Meteor grimaced. “Believe it or not, they are perfectly capable of defending themselves against Garleans. As are the Ascians, I presume.” That comment made several eyes turn towards Lahabrea, who was still doubled over and wheezing slightly. They would have to ask what the hell his damage was once they had a moment to stop, but alas… there was not. With a scowl on their face they turned to look towards the uppermost walkways of Baelsar’s Wall.

All in all, much like Zenos atop the palace in Ala Mhigo, Ilberd had gone on to be a dangerous opponent who deprived his opponent of the chance to truly claim victory over him. Unlike Zenos, however, Ilberd was truly dead once all had been said and done. And despite losing her closest support to him, Lyse had once openly wondered what might have happened had he _survived_ it. If she were to ask them again at this very point, they would have begrudgingly said that it would have turned into another situation of one Fordola Lupis and her continued rightfully miserable existence. But while Fordola was a controlled evil, Ilberd would have continued being unpredictable—and the only people who truly would have called for his head would have been the Scions.

They were grinding their teeth as they marched onwards, their sword in their hands as alien as it was when they had plucked it off the ground during their early days in Ishgard. The rest of their suddenly rather motley crew followed behind, joined them whenever clear former Crystal Braves who wholly embraced Ilberd’s ideals over the Scions’ tried to take their shot at the famous Warrior of Light. Several stopped dead after drawing their weapons again, dropped the weapons and clawed at invisible attackers that signified that Lahabrea had dug his hands into their aether and yanked them around. Those frozen in place were easy pickings for Renda-Rae, who drew her arrows fast and sent them flying even faster, joined almost effortlessly by Ardbert charging forwards. Swift winds heralded destruction as Lamitt flung the spells of ancient Ronka around to pick off what Renda-Rae and Ardbert did not, whereas Ryne, Nyelbert and Branden brought up the rear. Flashes of light blinded her opponents as Ryne dodged out behind the armoured man to swipe at attackers to distract them just enough for the mage to rain cinders upon their heads.

Somehow, this party configuration was more upsetting than challenging Lahabrea with the Exarch and Ryne. Hells, Lahabrea had already quit the given script by that point and _gotten serious._ If they had to be honest for a second, Meteor was worried that Ilberd would be completely ignoring the script from the word go. This was too early. It was still as coordinated as ever, but… there were factors that simply did not match the original script. The Warriors of Darkness first and forehand.

“I know that Elidibus sent you, but why… why are _you_ here?”

Ardbert shrugged at that.

It was Lamitt who crossed her arms and rolled her eyes at that and instead looked up at Meteor with a scowl on her face. “Nowhere else to go but here. We still know not if we can save our home, so this is all we _could_ do.”

A cough from behind made them all turn around to look.

Lahabrea looked, frankly put, like someone had run him over with a Chocobo carriage. While already not a—pun intended—paragon of looking like someone who paid more than a minimum amount of attention to how he looked, in the last few days he certainly looked as if he stopped sleeping altogether. Deep shadows did not do him any favours with his dark complexion, and Hythlodaeus at some point quietly wondered if the Speaker had stopped paying attention to body upkeep. “It is fairly easy to keep the outer shell presentable while the insides rot away completely,” the Seer had unsettlingly cheerfully said, and Meteor dimly remembered hearing of one such case not too long after the bloody banquet. “Unfortunately you tend to start looking and feeling unwell the further your body rots away.”

The Speaker insisted he was _not_ rotting away but also refused to elaborate what made him wince every time someone spoke too loudly around him. Pale as he was, it was incredibly hard to tell how he was feeling.

“Consider your First under the supervision of the Con… the Paragons. While yes, it was our fellow Paragons’ misjudgement causing your ill-advised attempt at salvation that saw it brought this low, a Flood of Light is best stopped by Bringers of Darkness.”

Ryne sheathed her daggers again. “I know not how far the Flood has advanced by this stage, but within that which has been eradicated by this point should be a Sin Eater of enormous proportions. Given that this is news to even us, I presume the Speaker has forwarded such to the Paragons dispatched to the First?”

Lahabrea flexed his left hand. “Worry not, Oracle of Light—your little flighty fanciful attempt at forging an alliance with the boy from the Void has not gone unnoticed. Your ‘Eden’ will be under control once the Flood is stopped. It is the process of stopping that has been left in well-trained hands.”

Ardbert scowled. Growled, even, in clear displeasure, and Meteor could barely manage to hold back a snort. He was still trying to keep up the facade of the hard-hearted Warrior of Darkness that they know to be untrue. But for the time being, he could not let his soft heart show. “Well-trained hands saw it brought this low in the first place.”

Much to their surprise, Lahabrea breathed out evenly. Not too long ago, he would have deliberately verbally fought any and all statements made in opposition. And while he winced, struggled clearly for a moment too long to be comfortable, his voice was level, calm and collected when he spoke—a voice that had clear experience in forwarding things to the masses in a quiet but encouraging manner. “While well-trained, Mitron and Loghrif’s greatest strength is also their shared greatest weakness. We had assumed that they would not be divided as they were—and divided they fell, normally good judgement clouded by burning hatred towards you and your group. Mitron but acted as any one slightly more emotional person would have. Were I to slay your friends, you would fall back upon any weapon closest and most familiar to you, even if in the same breath you would split the very ground you stand upon. A misjudgement on our part; one that we can at the very least somewhat help alleviate.”

Those flowery, soft words were far from enough to appease the Warriors of Darkness. Dark, displeased expressions all around, it was rather clear that they did not harbour much hope for the plan despite having been filled in. Ryne tried to explain how she and Gaia had used Eden in the end to revitalise the Empty, how their initial success would spread across the scorched blank lands and eventually, in a generation or three, would see it habitable again. But unlike her situation, there were still those that clearly remembered the countries and cities that had been lost. History was fresh on all survivors’ minds as they fled their homes, rather than most of what remained known being meticulously placed in libraries and soon were more legend than truth. While Voeburt may very well have already faded into the Faerie Kingdom Il Mheg—the notion made the knight’s harsh expression fade into something soft, heartbroken for a moment—the Fae would honour the knowledge and perhaps in time the survivors of Voeburt could retake their country as the Fae’s original living grounds were restored.

Poor Pauldia, Beq Lugg had whispered, forgotten and left to rot. Perhaps poor treacherous Pauldia could yet be freed from her forgotten prison, and perhaps her condition could be healed. Beq Lugg and Voeburt at large might never forgive her for what she had done, but should her life be spared then she could at least still try to make amends. In a bizarre way, it mirrored how Meteor felt towards the Ascians by this point; forgiving them was beside the point and against their belief besides, yet even they could not deny that all Ascians now appeared to be working towards a common goal that aligned with the Scions’.

“You and us are in similar boats,” Meteor eventually said to break the brooding silence that had spread as they continued a brisk march up to the highest reaches of Baelsar’s Wall. “Perhaps in due time you can return to the First and do what you can to contribute to its restoration—alas, no longer as mortals, unfortunately.”

Ardbert glared at them and yet said nothing.

“… I am rather certain that Seto above all else would be pleased to have you return and embark on a journey of restoration—hand-in-hand with your erstwhile enemies or not.”

For a split moment, shock ran through the group. From Renda-Rae to Nyelbert and Branden, Lamitt and even the clearly horrified Ardbert, all of them paused as they remembered one of two lost members of their merry band. As Seto had eventually confessed with a forlorn look to him, he had known that none of them would be getting up again. Yet he had called for Ardbert and the others over and over, desperate and horrified, until a local Kholusian farmer had found the distressed Amaro and five corpses that showed no sign of a struggle and only one bloodstained axe. While the Warriors of Darkness had clearly not been present for that any longer, it was not hard to guess what had happened after their demise.

* * *

There were two instances of Gyr Abanian violet cloth in their memory where it fluttered so very, very mockingly in the winds. One was the retaken Castellum Velodyna in the distance as they helped an injured soldier stand on the way from Specula Imperatoris back to Ala Ghiri. Against the setting sun the distant flag that M’naago had so heroically placed to the cheers of her fellows of the Resistance it almost seemed a parody of what they had felt in that very moment. The Resistance member had coughed vaguely and thanked them for the help and that he could take it from there, but the heartbroken look he threw down the peaks and at that distant speck of violet spoke lengths about what he felt. It was Lyse’s clumsy but passionate speech beseeching her fellow countrymen that while her father had claimed liberty or death and that she was willing to walk that mile a hundred times over if she had to, she did not wish for anyone else to follow her if death was all that awaited them. Freedom could be won, had to be won, but she was not willing to wade through the blood of everyone else for it. Mocking violet or not, in the end that passionate speech had reignited the sparks of rebellion, now with the added spark of both revenge and the desire to see the fight through for those that no longer could.

The second instance was the bizarre lighting as Meteor stared over the edge that Ilberd had deliberately taken the fall off of. The Eyes of Nidhogg shone like warning lamps, and their alien glow all but ignited the purple of his cape—the same Ala Mhigan violet that would soon be both promise and nightmare to them. Bizarre, upsetting violet that burst into a backdrop colour of agony for them and Lyse both as Shinryu started unfurling clumsily as an entity of no name but something called forth in Rhalgr’s name. It was a twisted version of the Gyr Abanian violet that sung a dirge not only for Papalymo but for every member of both the Resistance under Ilberd and every single life of the Alliance and Garlemald claimed in the fights that broke out on Baelsar’s Wall.

Try as they might, there was no reasoning with Ilberd. And while this was far from a duel atop the world ablaze between the Shroud and the Fringes, the seconds stretched seemingly into eternity. Too fast-paced for the slow and stationary Lahabrea and Nyelbert. Too unpredictable for the normally so focused and alert Renda-Rae, Branden, and Ryne. Too unknown for even those that normally relied on knowing each other like Ardbert and Lamitt. And Meteor themself, as ever, the sole overwhelming presence that stood against a tide that none could hope to surmount. Oh, it was perverse.

Perverse that still, despite all that, they were the one to truly be capable of tracking this fight. Perverse that Ilberd, once he narrowed his opponents down to merely them, still laughed and asked if this was the extent of their hatred.

Back before they had had hatred. It had made their muscles ache and their head hurt, had nearly blinded them. This man who had indirectly been responsible for Minfilia’s sacrifice as the Word of the Mother, who had caused each and every single Scion a measure of heartbreak and pain in some regard, had nearly _broken_ not only Alphinaud but also Flame General Raubahn, and who had sold not only all his supposed allies but also very nearly the Sultana who desired naught but the best for her people—Ul’dahn or Ala Mhigan citizen or not.

Now, they were not sure if they _hated_ him. They hated few things wholly, and Ilberd was a strange case of being unable to tell where a personal grudge ended and where a hero’s desire for a better world began. In a sense, Ilberd had a point.

It did not make his actions any less atrocities committed in the belief that he was right.

But much like Emet-Selch atop his own throne of delusion, Ilberd would give no quarter and take every ilm that Meteor let him take. The key difference between the Ascian and the more-monster-than-man before them was that Emet-Selch had accepted his defeat with a measure of forlorn dignity. Even compared to the indignant Lahabrea who remained in denial until the last possible moment, Ilberd refused to accept his defeat. There was no defeat planned for him in the first place. And should he fall here on Baelsar’s Wall, then the fires of his Primal would set the world ablaze in his stead—as long as it freed Ala Mhigo.

As long as it returned Amaurot.

As long as it kept the realm safe.

“Hatred?” they asked, and their nonchalant tone made the man stop for but a heartbeat. No doubt. No regret. But for the briefest of moments, Ilberd wondered if he had misjudged the Warrior of Light. “Aye, I’ve hatred aplenty, but I wonder whether or not I ought to waste any on bottom-feeder scum like you.”

He was, in the strangest sense of the thought, not much unlike Zenos. Both of them sowed the seeds of violence in people’s hearts for surprisingly selfish reasons, although one could claim that liberty was quite less selfish than what the Garlean desired. Both of them craved to be the centre of the Warrior of Light’s hatred, yet all they found in the end, once all had been said and done, was a strange amount of pity. Pity for Ilberd, who deserved none all thanks to the horrendous sacrifice that his creation required. Pity for Zenos, who in the end took his own life now that the high he had chased all his life had proven to be unsatisfactory in a sense. Pity for Emet-Selch, so utterly crushed by the loss of the long-forgotten that all the erstwhile architect who built for things to last could do now was build to destroy.

And ever since getting to know them, that strange pity for the once hated extended to Elidibus, Lahabrea and yes, even Hythlodaeus in a strange sense of that they had never quite hated him until they met him in another timeline.

Admittedly, they tried.

They tried to sever his hand holding the sole, previously untouched Eye that churned with energy and the question of how it had found its way to him. Their Echo showed them a flash of white teeth on a face beneath a white hood and no other distinguishing features. Ilberd refused to talk, kept on prattling on and on in his mad mantra. They tried and missed, and for their failure to act quicker despite knowing what would happen, once more bizarre light swallowed up the world as charged, active aether flooded Baelsar’s Wall.

The Scions would be arriving with Cid Garlond before long. If no one stepped up, Papalymo would once more take matters into his own hands—he had already requested the broken staff, the selfsame one that Nabriales had tried to take.

But just as they considered asking Lahabrea to help them, a gauntleted hand fell on their shoulder. Meteor turned their head to look into blue eyes that may very well have been mirrors of their own.

Once, they had been on the ground, nearly unable to keep their senses together long enough to answer the quiet, solemn question that Ardbert had asked them then and there. Back then, they had been alone. The smile Ardbert had given them then had been bittersweet, heartbroken.

Now it was almost cocky if a little nostalgic, and beside him was not the bright emptiness of their fading conscience but instead his friends and partners in crime.

“Just make sure to hold the Ascians true to his words,” Ardbert said and cocked his head into Lahabrea’s general direction. “And give Seto both our regards and our apologies.”

They had so very desperately tried to stay with Papalymo—to the point that the Lalafell had turned to face them with a sad but confident smile on his face and had sent them flying backwards onto the Excelsior. Part of them longed to stay with Ardbert just as he had stayed with them until the bitter end; yet they were the first to break away when they heard the telltale noise of an airship engine. Not because they wanted to. They _had_ to, given their current company of Lahabrea and Ryne, neither of whom had self-preservation skills or the heart to leave like-minded people in peril.

There was but a distant, confused question from Krile when they pushed Ascian and Oracle onto the airship to meet with the rest of their group—apparently they had picked up the five that had been left behind on their way up here—as to whether she was imagining the Warriors of Darkness in this very moment, but Meteor did not give her an answer. All they could do was as they had done before; with Cid, Biggs and Wedge all but barely outplaying death behind a steering wheel once again they stood half-leaning over the rails to watch the aetheric lightshow atop Baelsar’s Wall unfold.

Except that this time, there was no heartbroken mutter of farewell from Lyse who raised a hand to her neck. This time, Meteor felt Minfilia’s familiar hand on their back as she, too, got closer to the railing to watch the morbid spectacle. This time, Papalymo muttered something about this particular spell being unfamiliar yet familiar in the strangest sense as one by one a temporary encasing trapped Shinryu once again. It would not take much longer for the Far East to call Yugiri back via Gosetsu’s sudden and inexplicable arrival. They could all but imagine Nero Scaeva sauntering in on an Alliance meeting to let them know that there was only one choice to be made here unless they were willing to send the Warrior of Light to perhaps their certain death; a grim reminder that despite all, Meteor was still flesh and blood.

They weren’t exactly any longer.

But somehow, they felt naught more than dread as they watched the lights fade and a mirror of Dalamud hang in the airspace around Baelsar’s Wall.

* * *

“Point your gnarly fingers elsewhere, you old harpy,” Emet-Selch hissed and swatted Lahabrea’s hand away. “I am most certainly _not_ involved with raising that bloodhound of a mortal.”

“Yet you cannot deny that he certainly played into your plans for eventual collapse,” Unukalhai deadpanned and tapped his staff against the crystalline floor.

“Yes, yes, blame me for little yae Galvus, why don’t you! Of course I planned for any and all of this, up to and including him _literally impaling my ex.”_

Another tap on crystal; this time it were boots Tataru had specifically made to match a fighting style consisting of mostly kicks and putting one’s weight behind said kicks. “Oh my. This might be the first time you acknowledged our involvement so _openly._ Why, Hades, I am flattered that you consider me your _ex_ rather than a _mere nuisance_ by now!”

“Keep your ridiculous flirting to yourself, Hythlodaeus, I beg you,” Elidibus groaned and dragged a hand down his face. “Lahabrea has a point, yet so do Emet-Selch and young Unukalhai. We are dealing with someone quite unpredictable, while also being able to predict whether our efforts have an effect on the timeline or not.”

All eyes turned onto the Seer, who shrugged vaguely and huffed. “Aye. Ending’s the same still, lest you wonder. The near future is surprisingly muddled still, but near the end it becomes a little clearer. It would seem that several of us attempt to reason with him and all pleas fall upon deaf ears. Still, I am rather perplexed as to how his own father—”

“No, stop right there. You mean _my grandson_ of all _useless_ mortals will be _directly involved_ with an attempt to _stop his own son?_ Please. If you must lie, lie better—I know you can.”

It devolved into one of the usual ridiculous displays that Architect and Seer kept having whenever they started arguing; at first unsettlingly civil and at last naught more than base insults while Elidibus tried to play the mediator he was supposed to be. Meteor rolled their eyes and instead turned to look at Ryne and Minfilia.

Once Ryne had confessed who she was and who the Word of the Mother had been to her, Minfilia had at first been taken aback and then come around to consider Ryne a strange younger sister. Those two had already been good friends before the bloody banquet, but now a new bond had been forged between them that seemed stronger, sturdier, more familial in nature than before.

This time, however, Minfilia had her eyes narrowed in thought.

“Thinking ahead is all good and well,” she breathed out eventually and returned Meteor’s inquiring gaze, “but the fact remains that the immediate future remains shrouded. With Papalymo and I still alive or on the Source, there is no doubt that something will change. And likely not for the better—you said that Lyse’s motivations had been drenched in the desire to do right by the dead. I doubt not that it is still a base desire of hers, there is no telling how Papalymo’s presence will affect her. Or mine.”

Ryne quietly shook her head, unsure what to say. The three of them watched as Emet-Selch tried to grab the much taller Hythlodaeus by the collar, a motion that the other Unsundered dodged with relative ease and a very confident, cocky grin on his face.

“… Or theirs.”

Meteor sighed. Loudly. Not loudly enough to disturb whatever nonsense the Unsundered had gotten into that had now made the Exarch all but jump to his feet to tell them to knock it off already. But loudly enough that Ryne and Minfilia both turned back to look at them.

“Somehow, I do not believe that you or Papalymo will be much of an issue here. Those four, however, very much will present an issue. And I have no way of telling how our prime target will react to that.”

There was _no way_ that Zenos was going to change his behaviour. He was the hunter in this equation—but they genuinely had no idea how he would react to more than one target.


	67. ACT IX: The Wall that Fate Scaled, Part 5

It started as a fairly innocent training session as far as everyone present was concerned. Something or other about honing skills when inevitably the Alliance called upon them to take care of whatever Primal Ilberd had conjured up, and the Warrior of Light had humoured it in good spirits and even better mood.

At the very least, until it all went wrong. What precisely had gone wrong, Unukalhai knew not. It was incredibly hard to see even for one trained in idle observation, given that he had to work with concealing his normal powers from Scion Y’shtola’s scrutinising eyes. Anything too overly umbral in nature she would catch without a doubt, and her knowledge of the Void and Voidsent as an Archon would doubtlessly immediately let her discern his powers for what they were—and there was no going back from that. He would be no better than a common Voidsent in her eyes, and it would jeopardise their mission.

But somewhere between the task that consumed his concentration whole—to keep pretending to be a thaumaturge drawing on idle astral and umbral poles in conjunction rather than a mage drawing upon the slavering corruption that saw those of the black undone with control that not a living being, especially not one whose birth name had been extinguished by the rise of an Echo-blessed star—something went wrong on a side that no one would have expected to go wrong.

An innocent training session in the wilderness surrounding Mod Dhona oft turned into genuine fights with the local wildlife. While the Source always rebounded back to balance, the Calamity had yet been in too recent memory for the corrupted aether of Mor Dhona to truly recover. Which in turn turned the wildlife from general pests into something quite more dangerous, but never to the point that it truly endangered experienced adventurers unless they chose to get too close to the resident Morbols down in the Tangle. With so many mages drawing upon differing sources of aether, the Scions and the supposed Warriors of Light all kept one eye out for the inevitable monster drawing too close.

It was the surprised yelp from the Scions Lyse and Papalymo followed by the screech of metal and shattering that made him turn his head from watching if more adversaries would try to make their way over to where presumably easy prey would be ripe for the picking.

Most locals underestimated how truly acidic the resident lake serpents were. While large enough to use blunt force more often than not, Unukalhai had noted before that they oft devoured prey much larger than them, therefore requiring much less sustenance compared to the other predators around Silvertear Lake. Perhaps they were the descendants of Allagan constructs of some sort, or there was something in their evolution that had made such offensive measures necessary, but in any case they certainly proved more dangerous than most things because of it. As he turned, and while he meant to offence to Ishgard as a whole, he could already tell their steel had failed the Warrior of Light. For one so reliant on a massive slab of steel, Meteor often joked that they hadn’t had to switch up their weapons much in recent years, falling back on an axe once in a very specific situation and then never again.

Faint smoke rose from the shattered sword, acid having literally corroded it beyond its breaking point. Just as Unukalhai turned to watch properly, just as Lyse jumped to kick one of the three serpents that Meteor had been holding back, just as Papalymo sent a second one to the seventh hell by incinerating it alive, Meteor retaliated with a blast of darkness that threw the snake into the very rock that Unukalhai had chosen as a perch. He staggered, tried to keep his balance—not that the world gave him the chance to. Without so much as a moment of hesitation or second thought or truly, anything resembling common awareness of others in a battle, Meteor flung themself after the snake with naught but their gauntleted fists as a weapon. Horrendous crunching noise was all Unukalhai heard before the ground beneath his feet gave way and rather than distant Silvertear Lake he now stared at the gloom-covered skies.

He did not land with his back shattered on the scattered smaller pieces of stone, thankfully. While not a gentle landing—it was accompanied by a crunch and dull pain and a noise he barely registered as as a moan of pain out of his own mouth—it was at least not one that would have the Scions believe him dead.

It made him acutely aware of how truly disconnected he was from the body he had chosen, however. The sharp pain near immediately dulled, and he had to give the Speaker credit where credit was due; while slow and sluggish in combat, he was a surprisingly fast healer when it came to covering up injuries that might have severely hampered normal mortals. Elidibus had ducked around the rock the moment he had seen Unukalhai fall, apparently, and whatever seriously traumatic head injury Unukalhai’s body may have sustained was healed up before it became a problem and Elidibus went out of his way to move Unukalhai ever so slightly to the side to where the ground was softer and free of rocky ground. An explanation as to how he was mostly uninjured should anyone else duck behind the rock to check on the adventurer called Comet after his fall.

But just as he kept his eyes on the gloomy skies, Unukalhai narrowed his eyes at what he half saw next.

Several snakes in several directions had tried to make prey of the training Scions.

A bolt of light split the skies as suddenly, inexplicably, gilded arrows rained down. Elidibus stared just as dumbfounded as Unukalhai did—but the hissing ceased, the cries of creatures in agony cut short as a volley of arrows tore their scaled flesh.

Unukalhai quietly took the hand that Elidibus offered him, the strange tension of the place suddenly choking as silence settled over their training fields.

While the Ascian made certain to support him to pretend that while uninjured for the most part, the boy was still dazed after his fall, he got to scan the situation properly once they returned to the Scions proper.

Truthfully, part of him had always wondered why Meteor seemingly had discarded any and all weapons they had used previously. The sword was all they needed, they had joked—but that turned out to have been quite a lie. Soft, shining, light aether dissipated from their weapon as they lowered the bow with a grim expression on their face.

It was the Scion Y’shtola who eventually broke the silence, tilting her head to the side and tapping her chin with a thoughtful expression as most Miqo’te did. “Well, consider me positively and negatively surprised. I had a feeling that _something_ was off, but I had not expected one of you to be revealed a master of more than one school of physical arts.”

“You would be rather surprised if you knew the half of it,” was Meteor’s extremely dry reply as they stomped one of their feet against the ground and cracked their neck.

Unukalhai narrowed his eyes. A very low aptitude for magic was necessary as bare minimum for dark arts and summoning weapons. The Echo allowed for things beyond one’s normal aetherial reach to work, such as teleportation. He had never quite thought about it, but it would seem that Hythlodaeus with his hypersensitivity to aether was not the only extreme in this party. Given their story, it made sense that their already low aptitude had stilled into near non-existence; light aether with naught to combat it did that to bodies.

“Enlighten me, then—we know so precious little about you and yours.” Y’shtola tapped the ground with her staff. “Not that we do not trust you, mind. But this curiosity has been eating away at several Scions since.”

Meteor sighed and shrugged. “I am rather afraid that there is naught of interest to be found, Archon. I am the child of La Noscean farmers. The restless one that each and every single family tends to have, the one that got away. They likely presume I died in a ditch on the side of the road before I ever reached anything resembling a city state.”

“… And they never went to look for you?” Lyse, her voice surprisingly quiet and thoughtful. If memory served, she had lost her family to a fight for liberty they had no way of winning by themselves, leaving her as the last of the Hext family standing.

“I do not dwell on such things. Besides, if I were to reveal myself as alive, it would put them in danger.” And all of a sudden, Meteor’s dismissive expression shifted into something dark enough to leave fear in one’s heart if they did not know better. “I do not intend to endanger them. Believe it or not, being a Warrior of Light is far from all cotton and candy and everyone loving you. If even one Garlean spy were to find them, I dare not think about what they might do to them. Not simply because they are my blood relatives, even.”

“Dark words for one claiming there is naught of interest to be found, but understandable regardless. I will not pry further,” Y’shtola said and closed her eyes, “but know that should any of you ever wish to speak about your clearly troubled pasts, know that we are your allies still and will not judge.”

Elidibus beside him tensed.

Unukalhai knew for a fact that the Scions would judge—but given the Antecedent’s far from empty threats, they would have to disclose their status before long.

“Are you well, Comet?”

He startled up. Archon Papalymo had his eyes narrowed at him.

“That must not have been a pleasant fall.”

“Uh, err… no. I… dizzy. I’m dizzy.”

Beside him, Elidibus stifled a small chuckle. “His luck served him well—mild disorientation is to be expected, but he did at the very least not hit any rocks at the bottom.”

* * *

As far as hilarious situations went, he would rank this one in particular just below getting approached by an Ascian as the already dark world went dimmer and dimmer the more blood he lost. The sheer absurdity of it was beyond comprehensible—and the best thing was just the mixed looks of indignation while also metaphorically having their hands in the cookie jar. Except the cookie jar was the Warriors of Light being treated as undefeatable entities instead of the supposedly very mortal humans they were despite all they had done. And of all people to call them out on it, it happened to be one of their former enemies. How precisely Nero Scaeva had found his way here, no one could quite say. It aggravated Cid Garlond to say the very least, whereas the newly welcomed back to the fold Alisaie merely rolled her eyes and loudly suggested that Yugiri could always dispatch of the Garlean should the need arise.

The lack of a Crystal Tower expedition made the hostility harsher. There was no small measure of goodwill that Cid had accrued over the duration of the time spent at Saint Coinach’s Find with his erstwhile childhood friend and self-proclaimed bitterest rival. Now it was but the bitterness one who had been hurt one too many times by his homeland, who had abandoned all and fled to the supposed enemy nation and found it much less horrendously disordered as one would have thought. There was no faint bond of friendship that had started weaving itself back together now that they were both traitors to the very soil they had been born on based on working on the same project.

Unukalhai found the notion of belonging to a nation ridiculous at best and completely nonsensical at worst. Ryne very much thought the same but held a measure of understanding for pride in where one had been born—the First had never crumbled so far that any and all borders would have killed those that remained. Eulmore and the Crystarium were their own massive monoliths in what remained, and the smaller settlements that survived merely existed as they pleased, giving no attention to whether they were dealing with Eulmoran traders or those hailing from the Crystarium as long as they were not forcefully being conquered.

This hostile behaviour and aggressive insistence that one country was better than the last made no sense.

Judging from the furrowed brows Hythlodaeus was glaring out under, he very much held the same sentiment.

Despite never claiming the other Unsundereds’ vision of returning to the old ways no matter the cost as his own, he still was Unsundered. A child of a world that had respected the borders drawn between cities and continents but that held together when the slightest thing threatened them, even if those who waxed philosophical ways endlessly in halls meant for rhetoric oft discussed whether or not it would be beneficial to Amaurot to intervene.

A child who had grown up to be a failed protector and who now had wandered the earth for so long as he further and further lost pieces of himself.

Now, that was a tale that sounded so painfully familiar to Unukalhai that he almost thought it laughable.

As Lahabrea had confessed, the rest of the Ascended had been informed of their circumstances. Elidibus had near had a heart attack on the very spot, and Emet-Selch had choked on whatever it had been he had been trying to ingest. They would halt the Flood of Light, they would tame the wings of Eden, and once the time was right they would be the help required for creating a connection between the Empty and the Void. The dormant, choked out elements of the Empty would reignite themselves with enough activity, and the corrupted elements of the Void would simmer down and balance themselves once a measure of stillness was reintroduced to the world. It sounded bizarre to his ears. Even more bizarre was the fact that no one had told Celaeno quite yet—he did not doubt that she still wandered the First with but her weapon by her side and a distant, dim memory of those Warriors of Light who had now halted a Primal of untold power here on the Source.

“—all well and good, but do you not think that so massive a party will doubtlessly draw attention?”

Unukalhai blinked and turned his attention back to the war council.

The speaker, the Scion Papalymo, had his arms crossed and a deep frown on his face. Next to the nervously shifting Lyse he looked almost like an ice statue for the moment he waited to regain everyone’s attention.

It is the deeply frowning and usually so quiet unless he can make a sarcastic quip Seer who sighs loudly and puts his hands on his hips. “A party divided has its merits, that is for certain. I shall yield my position for the Lady Yugiri so she can uphold her end of the bargain with tol Scaeva.”

He notices that the aforementioned tol Scaeva frowns at that—but somehow Unukalhai does not believe it is because of the shinobi watching his every move and ready to kill him should he slip up ever so slightly being put in the party to awaken Omega. No, he reckons, it is because he was referred to with the title each and every single Garlean whether by birth, military rank or via subjugation is granted. According to the Crystal Exarch, he insisted on the tol Scaeva up until the bitter end of their expedition. But each and every single bit of paper he signed once he joined the Ironworks during the search for Omega during and after the Ala Mhigan liberation war he had signed as “Nero Scaeva”. Therefore, any and all attachment to Garlemald as a whole had likely faded from this fool playing at saviour of the saviours entirely on its own as he lived in a self-imposed exile.

“I’ll stay, too,” Ryne said to the general surprise of everyone around. She was usually one of the first people to volunteer for just about anything, but she merely gave a sheepish, almost embarrassed smile and shrunk away a little. “I… I do not feel particularly well. Take Alisaie in my stead.”

The teenager at least nodded grimly and with no small measure of gratefulness on her face. She was not one to sit still, apparently—something that Ryne knew thanks to being one of the time travellers.

“I will abstain from taking part in this operation as well.”

Normally leaving a healer behind was a bad idea at best and terrible for the overall party at worst, but Lahabrea closed his eyes with a mild groan and raised a hand to his head. He had been under the weather for quite a while.

“Well, someone will have to—”

“Forget it. If someone is required to look after Oracle and Speaker that is not Seer, it would be wisest to leave me behind,” Elidibus immediately cut Emet-Selch off.

Unukalhai had his doubts that Elidibus was staying behind out of concern for the Speaker and the Oracle of Light. It more seemed as if he was trying to keep Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus apart—something that made sense given their latest near bout of having a fistfight at the smallest verbal disagreement.

Nero Scaeva at the very least merely shrugged while Cid Garlond pinched the bridge of his nose with a frustrated sigh. The party split up accordingly, and Unukalhai scrunched his nose up a little.

The Exarch and the Warrior of Light fought well together—especially now that the Warrior of Light had confessed to being a weapon master of some sort. Emet-Selch was a perpetual loner but at the very least it seemed as if he was slowly but steadily dropping the facade of playing at Allagan summoner and instead had moved on to carrying a staff and a gun once more.

Still, a group of effectively only mages and two Garleans was… far from encouraging.

But he could not begrudge the ones who volunteered to stay behind that they were staying behind—Ryne and Lahabrea genuinely looked unwell, Hythlodaeus bristled still in large groups and Elidibus was one of the people who likely knew what was ailing Oracle and Speaker both.

If only the group going to fetch Omega were not so… volatile.

* * *

He did not exclude himself from the volatile statement, however. Unukalhai and Emet-Selch were similar in that regard that they were both loners and worked best on their own, unobstructed by other people either out of necessity in Unukalhai’s case or simply because they did not like working with others in Emet-Selch’s. Most mages needed someone to keep them safe, but Unukalhai could not do more than shout a half-hearted apology into the round when new arrival Gosetsu flinched away from the bolt of lightning he had just rained down upon a Magitek slasher of some sort.

Lyse, while surprisingly shy when it came to general conversation, seemed to liven up on the battlefield. She did not fight as recklessly as she did when she had pretended to be her sister, but there was a method to her still remaining recklessness. That method, as far as Unukalhai saw, was that she knew the Scion Papalymo had her back. Whatever she missed he dispatched, whatever threatened to get too close to the thaumaturge she dutifully crunched. The same sort of familiarity that the Exarch and the Warrior of Light had between each other; Meteor even went as far as fighting shoulder by shoulder with Lyse on one occasion when Emet-Selch so _graciously_ hogged the Magitek armour that Scaeva had sent to them to help them thin the crowd a little.

Somehow, somewhere along the line, he had wound up back to back with Scion Papalymo.

The sheer amount of machinery this one fool had brought was ridiculous if one were to ask Unukalhai, but they certainly did their job. With Emet-Selch busy dispatching the massive giants with the Exarch somehow having climbed into the pilot seat with him and angrily making certain that Emet-Selch shot the right things, with both the far eastern warriors and the Scion fighters taking care of the humans amongst the Garlean assortment, both mages of the group found themselves surrounded by Magitek Reapers.

“Mind, I have no intention of starting a fight,” Papalymo eventually said as they turned once more to shower sparks and bolts of lightning down upon the machines before dashing apart to dodge a wound-up blast they had been watching, “but there are some things about your fighting style in particular that have been bothering me ever since I watched you in action, Comet.”

Unukalhai hated to admit that his blood was running cold and he was clutching his staff like a crutch at this point. “Can this not wait until we are in less dire straits?”

“Out of all members of your merry group that we call the Warriors of Light, you are the sole member I have not yet had the pleasure to speak with at length, given that you joined the endeavour after Lyse and I had sought shelter with the Resistance. Somehow you also prove the most elusive. You need not answer, and please under no circumstances take this as an insult—we are in this together, after all—but I do have been wondering… are you one of the mages who drank too deep of the Void like Mhach did?”

Truly, were this not a life and death situation—where he had to make certain he remained on the side of life not because he cared but because he had a role to play—he would have stopped to laugh. Instead, he swung his staff around and focused a short-range blast of ice on a stray line of fire that Alisaie had misfired. It doubled as a makeshift wall that he and Papalymo dove behind just in time for a hail of bullets to uselessly slam into the thick ice.

“One would think that a Warrior of Light’s spells all have at least a spark of light within them, but all of your signature spells are like beholding a deep, churning abyss.” He tapped his rod against the ice wall as if to underline his statement. “It would also explain your reclusive nature and how an aetherologically knowledgable mage like the Speaker would have wound up working with you while he did something or other. I suppose in a sense I speak out of concern; few mages ever claimed control over the Void and each and every single one of them succumbed to hunger and turned into a Voidsent themselves or they were devoured by the very creatures they claimed to control.”

He scowled as they once more jumped apart just as the ice burst, Unukalhai swinging his staff overhead to cast and Papalymo holding his in front of him. Now that it had been mentioned, Unukalhai watched with a jolt of horror that the shower of stars they both called down individually differed ever so slightly. The Source’s misconception of astral and umbral charge in mind, it certainly looked as if his meteors were umbral—calmer in the sense that they burned so bright that they all but immediately fizzled out next to Papalymo’s that continued lazily burning for a while after impact. The continued flame would be seen as astral, something active; when instead it was umbral that was the active. Proper active fire burnt so bright it consumed itself, which was precisely what his umbral meteors did.

“… The trick is to not give them a way to bend the contract,” Unukalhai hissed after a while of silence—Papalymo was true to his word and had not said another thing, instead letting him choose whether or not to give an answer. “Most self-proclaimed Masters of the Void were so self-assured in their superiority that they failed to see the faux contract for what it was. Driven by hunger they may be, they are still sentient. Devilishly intelligent and sentient.”

“….” Four Magitek Reapers crackled and collapsed under the latest shower of lightning as Papalymo refrained from showing what was going through his head.

Unukalhai meanwhile gripped his staff like a lifeline. “It has to be mutually beneficial, aye, but there are ways to avoid the chaos that comes with leaving enough room for deception. I will not tell you what it is that my contract entails, but know that you need not fear any sort of… the usual nonsense associated with mages who gaze too deep into the Void. I know its temptations. I know its machinations. Intelligent tricksters though they may be,” and with that Unukalhai shot the Scion a smile and whirled around. Another three Reapers had collapsed since and Unukalhai stared the last three down with that smile still on his lips. “Unfortunately for the Voidsent, I learned how to out-trick the tricksters.”

For a moment, it seemed as if the entire battlefield held its breath. Unukalhai collapsed that moment by swinging his staff and drowning the remaining Reapers in a deluge of darkness that immediately receded when he yanked his staff backwards. In the same heartbeat Emet-Selch and the Exarch shot down the last Iron Giants just in time for the Reaper Nero had sent them to run out of ammunition and the remaining footsoldiers thinking better of their situation and turning tail to flee.

What was left was an alliance of some unlikely allies staring down the one remaining Garlean commander who went from bombastic claims of strength to indignant screeching and attempting to take them all down at once.

* * *

For those they had lost.

For those they could yet save.

The Antecedent lived by these words—there was a strange aura to the scene Unukalhai witnessed in the Rising Stones as the Ala Mhigans all stood side by side, grim determination on their faces. From Lyse to Minfilia to Wilred, each and every single Scion with a partial attachment to Gyr Abania had suddenly jolted to life when the Alliance leaders said that perhaps now was the best time to pre-emptively strike. The Scions would be sent as the Alliance’s messengers, to reach out and to forge an alliance with the Ala Mhigan Resistance.

Lyse and M’naago had grabbed each other’s hands and jumped about before the Miqo’te left to forward the news to her superiors. Arenvald had nodded with a grim expression on his face while Alphinaud nodded to him and Wilred.

The Domans meanwhile bid farewell to Lady Yugiri and the Samurai Gosetsu, well-wishes for their Lord Hien exchanged in what must have been Doman that his Echo translated for Unukalhai.

Somehow, he had a feeling that something was going to go extremely wrong very soon.


	68. ACT X: Incidentally Unintentionally Futuristical Ally, Part 1

According to history books, the Scions had been barely more than a token force, strong enough to steamroll any scouting parties in their path, yes, but still barely more than a token force to forward the Alliance’s offer to help the Resistance. Every so often a member of the Ironworks liked to think of themselves as the Scions marching to Rhalgr’s Reach—with their Rhalgr’s Reach being a whole other star by any means. And unfortunately in this scenario, one G’raha Tia was the Warrior of Light.

When he was younger he had _yearned_ to be a hero like those in his favourite books. He had near fainted when the actual, legitimate Warrior of Light just so happened to be a genuine part of their expedition. Once it was over he would have personally marched to the Rising Stones and request joining them despite having nothing but knowledge of Allagan things. It never came to that, of course, but it was a story he kept close to his heart even as he stood beside the Scions mostly through accident rather than design.

This was hardly a token force.

The glacial difference between one and eight people who called themselves Warrior of Light was _staggering._ With those Warriors of Light were the Scions—with the addition of Minfilia, Papalymo and Wilred. Truly, it seemed ridiculous to think that they would make it to Rhalgr’s Reach undetected.

From what he could tell, however, was that the general disposition of the group was much more joyful, hopeful, than the almost grim march that the Scions had marched across the Velodyna and to Rhalgr’s Reach. Meteor had picked up Krile at her request back then—shallow and wide the river may have been at this point, but it was still a death trap in disguise for a Lalafell. He half expected Krile to sarcastically comment about the river this time around as was her wont, but she merely shrugged with a lopsided grin.

“A little help would be much appreciated indeed. Raha—I mean, Exarch, if you would be so kind?”

This was how he found himself wading through the Velodyna beside Minfilia who was having a discussion of some sort with Krile; and the aforementioned Lalafell perching on his shoulder. He simply hoped that she did not realise that his shoulder most certainly did not feel like it was flesh under light but sturdy leather. Hells, her sitting on his shoulder like that brought back the phantom pain of a limb that was clearly missing yet also very obviously not. While the crystal was part of his body, it certainly felt alien whenever someone made him too aware of it.

And as Emet-Selch had said in no uncertain terms there was a fair chance the crystal would start dissolving any tissue in its way to spread further the more he dug into powers that were not his. If it got one of his vital organs there was a fair chance that he would drop dead and crystallise entirely within seconds and there would be nothing anyone could do about it.

He shook off the doom and gloom and instead focused on another oddity.

Papalymo.

The Scion continued frowning as he watched the little gaggle of people up in the front. Lyse, M’naago, Wilred and Arenvald all oohed and ahhed as Meteor pulled a bow from seemingly thin air and sent a gilded arrow flying into the distance, only to follow it up with a blast of darkness that marked a dark knight’s arts and then simply swung a likewise gilded axe through the shallow water a split second later. Unukalhai brought up the very rear, his head ducked and a frown on his face as he seemingly avoided being in the Scion’s general vicinity—as if something had happened. Whatever it was, the most quiet member of their group remained just that; quiet.

Once more it had been Emet-Selch who had shrugged and said it as sardonically as he could: they were reaching a point where it would get ridiculously hard to keep their identities secret for much longer.

“The thing about liberation wars of any sort is they drag secrets to the light that had better stayed entirely dead and buried,” he had said and pinched the bridge of his nose when Hythlodaeus followed it up with a bitter “Like us, then”.

The tension amongst the Unsundered was so plainly obvious by now that several people had asked if they had fought. No one had a true answer to that—there was a dynamic to them that clearly had its origins in times before the Sundering, amongst the backstories they still guarded like precious, precious belongings. All of them refused to be referred to by their given names save the Seer, and even he usually sneered before turning his head towards whoever of the Sundered was addressing him with his name at times. His entire disposition was getting harder and harder to read, the violently shifting mood from amicable to antagonistic near impossible to track. Something that the other Unsundered also were not quite sure how to read, and all three of them reacted differently to it.

Lahabrea punished it with silence, acting as if he had not just been deeply insulted by someone who was supposed to be his ally.

Elidibus acknowledged insults or backhanded compliments with a frown that betrayed that he was _worried._

Emet-Selch meanwhile poured oil in the open flames or salt in the wounds, unwilling to let any of this bounce off him.

This set-up was going to blow up sooner or later.

Assuming, of course, that nothing else went wrong in the meanwhile.

Meteor had confessed that they were worried about how Zenos was going to start acting as soon as his role in this story began. With one Warrior of Light and Fordola’s single-minded obsession it was easy enough to track. With eight of them, however….

* * *

“Say, Exarch,” he turned towards Lyse, who had been given the same duty as him while the leadership of Rhalgr’s Reach discussed the Alliance’s offering, “if you’re from Sharlayan like Krile, where’s your tattoos?”

He drew his ears back.

Alphinaud had started the question recently but Alisaie had punched him on the arm and dragged him off. Asking about not immediately visible Archon tattoos was usually not exactly seen as good sport, but most of them were plainly visible and thus the question never really came up. The tattoos were badges of honour, after all. Tickets to places only reserved for those who had finished their initial studies and now sought to further their knowledge in their chosen fields. Meant to be flaunted even if it meant precious little to the people of mainland Eorzea who were not aware of what they meant.

His were covered by crystal. Each and every tattoo; Archon or Student of Baldesion did not matter. Taken off with the limb, covered and likely dissolved by the crystal that had since spread over his body.

He forced a grin of some sort.

“Same spot that Emissary has his on.”

Lyse huffed. “Well, yeah. Obviously. The whole clone thing still goes a little over my head, really—but it’s not like Emissary is the most… forthcoming? Chatty?”

The Exarch closed his eyes with a small sigh. “You may call him a stuck-up arse if you so wish, I will not think any less of you, Lyse. The neck, much like most Archons.”

“Huh! You didn’t strike me as the sort of person to stick to the general consensus.”

“… I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but if you want the full confession: I did not pay any mind to it and simply told them to get it over and done with so I could run to the next library to access whatever I wanted now that I could.”

For a moment she stopped, then she let out a barking laugh. “Just like—” Her laugh died as quickly as she had started laughing, and a forlorn look appeared on her face. “—Yda.”

It was bizarre to see a key figure of history, one of the many heroes of the Ala Mhigan Liberation War to stand here looking like she doubted she would even live to see the next sunrise. He so very desperately wished he could tell her that she was going to succeed in living up to the legacy that Curtis and Yda had left her, that she was going to surpass them in some regard even. That she had done so in two different timelines already; cut short by an Eighth Umbral Calamity or the rise of the forgotten Elder Deities of a lost civilisation or not. She would succeed like the other versions of her and she was going to get to see her home restored and not immediately crushed by horrific events outside of her control.

But he couldn’t.

Instead he merely walked up next to her and put a hand on her shoulder.

“We’ll see Ala Mhigo freed. For those we have lost. For those we can yet save.”

* * *

The morale of the group was oddly divided—and the method to their split seemed to be putting those in high spirits with those in low spirits and avoiding putting too many energetic people together and leaving a void in the other place. He had to hand it to Minfilia, she was a skilled leader who covered whatever weaknesses the fighters had off the battlefield rather well.

One group for the Peaks and one group for the Fringes; but dividing the group properly was an art he only really understood when he weaved around the rocks just as M’naago did before him.

Ryne had complained of nightmares lately, putting her squarely in the low morale group alongside the gloomy Unukalhai and the constantly infighting Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus.

Despite his recent migraines, Lahabrea kept a level head and was therefore as temperate as Meteor, the Exarch and Elidibus. Belonging to that group, too, were M’naago and Meffrid as well as Papalymo and Alphinaud.

Comparatively high-energy were Lyse, Wilred, Arenvald and Alisaie.

Minfilias’s further party division took care of the rest of the group dynamic. While Lahabrea did complain that he had to slosh through the Velodyna once more, it was fairly obvious that he would have complained even more in the event that he had been sent to the peaks. Emet-Selch appeared to brood as he, too, weaved around the rocks after they dispatched a scouting group, his gloom accompanied by the aura of tiredness that surrounded Ryne. Arenvald and Alisaie meanwhile had to be reminded to not rush blindly ahead by Papalymo.

The Peaks group following Meffrid meanwhile consisted of Lyse and Wilred for the high morale representatives, Hythlodaeus and Unukalhai for the low morale, and Meteor, Alphinaud and Elidibus for the temperate group.

He did have to note that Minfilia also intelligently—and so very, very cruelly—divided the dynamics that could cause problems should a fight break out. As much as he did not like admitting such, the lack of Echo was becoming blatantly obvious by this point and with them free to pull whatever weapon they could, Meteor had shifted their attention in combat from the enemy to keeping him safe above all else.

“I do have to wonder,” Ryne quietly said after a while, “why have you not insisted on going with Lyse, Papalymo?”

They had just about reached the Velodyna, with the Scion quietly staring at the water that was so treacherous for a Lalafell despite the fact that Arenvald had offered carrying him across already.

“I may have played her keeper for long enough to near trick myself into becoming the role, but it was never my intention to keep her trapped in her disguise. Yda would have seen me sacrificed on a good old-fashioned Ala Mhigan pyre had I let this continue for much longer. But she was grieving. So was I. So were we all. Therefore we humoured her attempt to keep her sister’s legacy alive by pretending to be her—and before we knew it, there was no easy way out of the little game of pretend.” He shook his head. “You have to thank M’naago here for softening her up enough to reveal herself.”

“Oh, please,” the Seeker immediately waved him off. “I did no such thing. And I do recall asking you to just call me Naago, Papalymo—we have fought together for long enough.”

He softly sighed out a laugh of some sort and shook his head. “Right, right. In any case, I am not Lyse’s keeper. I will no longer pretend I am. And her travelling to the Peaks is something she must do on her own. Besides,” and with that he turned to look at Arenvald, “someone has to play a heavy package to carry across the river. Arenvald, if you would.”

He very quickly found himself roped into keeping lookout with M’naago—she claimed that Seeker eyes were best suited for keeping watch like this. It was no different from hunting prey, and he almost did not have the heart to tell her that he was from the mountain-born G tribe rather than any of the Eorzean hunting tribes. Still, he humoured her and they found no more trouble en route to the makeshift Alliance headquarters to deliver their response to Raubahn.

The place was positively brimming with energy, but the Exarch was not given the chance to drink in the atmosphere of being in a place that the history books he had devoured after his awakening in the future talked about. He found himself dragged along to a supposedly abandoned settlement with Ryne by a Keeper from the Twin Adders. He did not pay much attention to what was going on even as he and Ryne swiftly dispatched a handful Garlean conscripts—and then froze when he heard two simple words that meant nothing to the Keeper and near nothing to Ryne.

Black Rose.

And suddenly the warm feeling of being where history was written died in his chest as he realised that not only was he where good history had been made, he also stood amongst the very ruins that would soon see the world devoured and the Source primed for a Rejoining so devastating that even the destruction and change that Dalamud had brought with its descent paled in comparison. He could almost taste the stale air of the future, could almost see the in places bleached and dead ground that only by the time he awoke started to vaguely recover from the Calamity. It would easily take another two hundred years before the balance of the Source would be restored enough to remotely consider calling off the Umbral Era, Biggs had said with a sad smile on his face as they watched the sun set in the distance. And even that only in case the people stopped killing one another and instead started pulling on the same string; something that seemed very unlikely to those living in the future days. Their only hope was changing the past to prevent it from ever happening in the first place, something that would see their timeline unravelled and erased as hopefully no Rejoining took place and no Calamity saw the Source devoured.

Their decision to travel here had been a spur of the moment decision, all things considered. The fact that Meteor had not hesitated to extend a hand to the very Ascian who had but moments before been ready to strike them down had paved the way for this current past chain of events—with Papalymo giving strategical advice to the Alliance as they all sat at their war table with the Resistance. With Minfilia having offered her hands at the Reach beside Krile and Y’shtola.

With Lahabrea sighing heavily and saying that he was going to accompany Alisaie as she tested out the Magitek Reaper near the Velodyna.

It was bizarre knowing that Arenvald was helping the Alliance and the Resistance train together while an Ascian doubtlessly gave his usually sarcastic comments about everyone’s forms.

Ryne put a hand against one of his arms. Judging from the frown on her face she must have remembered what Black Rose was and why it shocked him into utter silence.

In a way, having her here beside him was comforting—a reminder that his work on the First had worked out until the least likely event of all came to pass. That he was not imagining this profound sense of loss as he remembered he had not only failed the Ironworks but also the Crystarium.

Yet at the same time he could still save them.

And that made him lash his tail.

“Standing around here and pondering does naught. Let us look for the escapee the soldiers mentioned and then see ourselves back to base before we jump to any conclusions.”

“Oh! Yes, yes, of course! Leave it to one of the Griffin’s Banes to do my job for me!”

He felt decidedly _G’raha Tia_ as he slunk around the abandoned settlement to look for clues. How was any of this different from running through the Pillars under attack to all but pilfer a book from a dead noble bloodline’s home? How was it different from sitting at Saint Coinach’s Find with naught but candlelight and the Warrior of Light holding a book upside down while lying on the ground in his tent?

* * *

Frankly, he had no idea what possessed him when he plucked the bow and the remaining arrows off the ground from next to the Maelstrom soldier who had been shot down by a conscripted mage. He had not drawn a weapon like that in well over a century—but somehow despite the crystal making him much stronger than he had any right to be, he remembered how to draw the string and to squarely hit the mage who had severely wounded the soldier beside him. But it was as if some sort of inhibitor in his head had turned off—rather than the Exarch fighting for the good of the world he wanted to be G’raha Tia in this fight, a fool who fancied himself a Warrior of Light despite lacking the Echo and having Allag breathing down his neck.

It was clumsy in parts, clearly overshadowed by years of fancying himself a protector and mage rather than a wily Student of Baldesion who wanted to use his tribe’s usual choice of weapon as a faint reminder where he came from. He was never as good at it as any of his half-sisters, and many blamed his ridiculous, freaky red eye for it, but the Exarch always knew that he could land targets if he but wanted to. Besides, as far as combat went—as long as he did not embed an arrow in Emet-Selch’s back as the Ascian pulled the trigger on his gun in front of him, he was doing just fine in combat.

The cheers of the Resistance crying Ala Mhigo joined by the Scions and the Alliance made him feel almost comically young once more as he joined the cheering. It was an energy that made all of them bounce a little when M’naago declared that this would be the perfect time to return to Rhalgr’s Reach to see if the others had returned from the Peaks yet. Even Ryne’s exhaustion seemed to have fallen off of her, and she smiled sheepishly when she said that she had been worried about this whole liberation war business enough that it had ruined her sleep, but she had to admit that her fears were completely baseless.

Yes, even the moody Emet-Selch had only a sigh for Arenvald and Alisaie before joining them up front at their request and confirming that this fight had been quite a sight to behold indeed.

The energy spread like a fire through the Reach—and caught the returners from the Peaks as well.

While their tale was effectively the same that Meteor had lived through before, it seemed as if there were just a few more people this time around. The Resistance and the Alliance were ready to work together, there were new recruits willing to fight for the freedom they had near given up after being shown that there was always a reason to fight back—and amidst that budding flame, the Exarch grinned beside the Warrior of Light as the two of them marched around the Reach to take care of one of their token so-called fetch quests.

Meteor flicked one of his ears and then all but dove off a cliffside to fetch the Resistance youth they had been told to find—he could not help but laugh loudly as they waved at him from down there once the young man all but stormed off cursing loudly that he had forgotten the time.

They both once again slowed down when they saw a familiar face standing in a circle of craftsmen trying to figure out something or other about a supply chain to keep the weapons intact.

“I hadn’t thought you to be a weapon connoisseur, Seer,” Meteor chimed up when they recognised the short dark-haired Elezen, and Hythlodaeus cringed as if someone had grabbed his neck with icy hands.

“I, ah, am not, not really,” the Unsundered said and waved his hand awkwardly while the other craftsmen all laughed.

“Well, whether is or not, he’s been a great help. Notices a lot of details for such a horrendously lanky fella,” a blacksmith said and a goldsmith beside him cackled.

“Normally the tall types all have their heads stuck in the clouds too much to notice anything groundside, yep,” she said. “But honestly, you’d think the Ananta taught him their craft. That’s how many details he took care of.”

Chief of the Bureau of the Architect before be accepted the seat of Gerun. Foresight or not, one had to keep track of many things at once to lead what must have been one of the busiest places in Amaurot. For someone as guarded as Hythlodaeus, he looked rather embarrassed as the laughing craftsmen said there was no reason to look so shocked, that the compliments were genuine.

Meteor frowned a little once they turned around and said that they would tell Conrad how the craftsmen were getting on.

“Everything okay?”

“Huh? Oh, yes.” Meteor shrugged. “I just… I cannot claim I am clairvoyant. I certainly do not have foresight, or anything else fancy that lets me catch a glimpse of the future. But—and please, do not laugh—I have the feeling that something is about to go _horrifically_ wrong. Not in the immediate future’s events sort of way. In the,” they turned and gestured into the vague direction of where Hythlodaeus was, “I dunno.”

Knowing the future was a burden. The Ironworks had apologised for sending him off with not only the burden of hope but also the burden of knowing a future like this, and he had not understood those words fully until the first survivors of the Flood huddled together at the Crystal Tower’s base. He hadn’t fully comprehended until the very day a young Lyna asked him if maybe one day the Sin Eaters would be gone because the Warrior of Darkness came and if he would take her to the other end of Norvrandt then.

He had planned for an immediate disaster, had plotted his own demise despite the many set-backs.

But he had climbed Mt Gulg with the gut feeling that something was about to go horrifically wrong. That he would somehow walk away from this place either alive or a Sin Eater, having wasted the knowledge of what the future held. He did in the end, all thanks to Emet-Selch. The very _horrifically wrong_ that he could not have accounted for that _had in fact gone wrong,_ but somehow it had worked out much better in the end.

He could almost hear the laughter and cheer from the Crystarium as the dark of night returned for a second time echo here in Rhalgr’s Reach. A bizarre, haunting sound where he swore he heard that trio of children whose names he never remembered chase each other around when it was just a bunch of Resistance trainees cheering on the little show fight Arenvald and Alisaie put on. Thought he saw Lyna lead a gaggle of guards about when it was an Ananta and a handful Alliance soldiers.

Twelve, he was homesick for a place that would never exist in this timeline, a place that was not even his proper home.

He leaned his head against Meteor’s arm as they both stood there watching the Reach.

“You may not know, but I share the sentiment,” he confessed quietly. “Something feels as if it will lead to irreparable collapse. And while we do not know what it is, I cannot help but wonder… is it not what will happen, but rather who it will bring?”

Meteor said nothing as they continued walking back towards the Ananta instructor who had requested they find her missing trainees. But he could see on their face that they, too, were thinking about the opponents they had yet to meet. Most specifically Zenos and whoever it was who told him things he should by no means know.

* * *

They gave nothing away. Merely said that Castellum Velodyna would be retaken before they would know it with the Alliance and the Resistance working side by side.

He noticed the small wince as their lie was accepted as the confidence of a Warrior of Light.

* * *

Reading about a battle truly never quite captured the utter horror that came with it. Lyse’s diary of the liberation war, penned as if she were writing to her dead family and closest confidants—Curtis, Yda, Papalymo, and while less obvious, Conrad as well as Minfilia—was called one of the more gruesome summaries of the slaughter at Rhalgr’s Reach. Yet none of her words could have made him imagine a battlefield ablaze with the smell of ceruleum and gunpowder, charred flesh and spilled blood, all under a layer of kicked up dust. It clogged his lungs, it burned in his eyes. Yet he and everyone else jumped between the Imperials hunting down those who had already surrendered, made certain to jam every weapon they could between Magitek joints and repaid every burn wound likewise.

Even Ryne, who had inherited Minfilia’s memories and therefore knew the horrors of fighting better than anyone but Meteor themself, seemed to be struggling after a while. One dagger stuck between a Magitek Reaper’s leg joints and the other lost because she had thrown it, she had very gingerly picked up a replacement weapon—a gunblade of Garlean design, very far from the ones that she knew how to load and yet just enough for her to carve through three soldiers trying to overpower her.

The hiss of magic as Unukalhai doused yet another Reaper in flame could not be put in proper words; and there were no words as Pipin and Raubahn stormed forwards only to arrive too late to save one Ananta and the seven soldiers she had been trying to guard. The Exarch had had no words for beholding the horror of a small settlement stained in grotesque white liquid, with not as much as a broken body remaining and scattered feathers telling of a struggle as a child wailed softly through the dense silence. He had no words for the fine, elegant gold jewellery embedded and encrusted with wonderfully cut crystals and gemstones and the shining scales broken and scattered amongst blood, gore and dust either. There was no wailing yet as he clutched his staff to his chest and ran past the scene, after the Alliance soldiers who were trying to find the others.

He was not quite sure he had a word for the expression on Hythlodaeus’ face either.

He had obviously not been with the Convocation, yet he had evidently lived through the Final Days of Amaurot as well. Considering all they had learned since Emet-Selch’s little taste of what those days had been like, the Exarch had reached the conclusion that while he played it off, Hythlodaeus may very well have seen people who Emet-Selch found dead later die. Considering that most of the Unsundered agreed that while he was difficult to deal with yet that he never would have left someone in need behind despite all that, Hythlodaeus likely had been in a similar situation as them now.

Whatever the Unsundered thought was impossible to tell. But his expression grew grimmer and grimmer as he went from arguably fighting fair but quickly to even just tackling Garleans out of the way to stomp after Raubahn. And just as impossible to tell was what Emet-Selch thought as he stormed after the Seer.

Elidibus meanwhile pushed his mask up a little to wipe some blood that had run under it out of his eyes. “Remind me again, Warrior of Light—what happens next?”

“Fordola,” Meteor hissed and dismissed their bow with a frustrated hiss. They had run out of arrows. “Fordola and Zenos.”

Indeed, the crowd had thinned—mostly through death. The stage for this part of the play was perfectly set and waiting for the other players.


	69. ACT X: Incidentally Unintentionally Futuristical Ally, Part 2

Emet-Selch was unsure what to make of his own work.

On one hand, this was precisely the horrendously oppressive empire he had meant to build. It was prime for collapse at this point, short-lived and surprisingly overwhelming much like Allag had been.

On the other hand, he had to admit that this was quite a ways _too far._ Perspective and all that, distance from his duties, but _heavens_ , this was _excessive_ in ways that only one Zenos yae Galvus could manage.

Normally the Garlean Empire let those who gave up go lick their wounds. Hunting them down like animals on the run was cruel in ways not even he would have thought the Sundered capable of. Then again, there were some truly rotten eggs even amongst the rotten eggs—not that he could call the Sundered that any longer. They had proven to be stupider, yes, but just as crafty and willing to work for peace as anyone before the Sundering had been once upon a time. And frankly, Amaurot’s last major disagreement had been solved rather violently as well. Shattering the star into many pieces to avoid the same mistakes was… an extreme measure. Just as extreme as any of this was.

The little wolfling had a nasty bite as she sold out her own. Admirable, in a despicable way—she was much too young to have so much craving for violence in her heart. But that craving paled in comparison to the one assigned to Ala Mhigo after van Baelsar’s apparent death.

Varis had been a disappointment. A cheap replacement for a son one could truly be proud of.

Zenos was abhorrent. No matter the attempts from his father to ensure the boy got what he wanted, Zenos grew up wretched in ways that not even Emet-Selch could as much as _stand_ looking at the young man. He was efficient—if a dog brutally tearing any game apart was needed. Brute force worked, yes, but this was so very much unlike the supposed virtues of the Empire that Solus had founded it for it was laughable.

They were playing by mortal rules.

And by mortal rules, Zenos yae Galvus was abnormally strong. So abnormally strong that according to Elidibus and the Warrior of Light, he had defeated the one Eorzea called undefeatable. Only a spark of curiosity had made him keep the Warrior of Light alive long enough to tell them to hunt him down if they so desired. A hunt that ended not because the Warrior of Light fell or because they won, but because the supposed hunter longing to become the hunted ended it prematurely. Allegedly. Supposedly.

Emet-Selch fumbled with and dropped the gun he had been using. He made certain to seem as if he were shaking from anger and exhaustion to go with his blood-slick hands. Lahabrea had rushed to Lyse, Conrad and Y’shtola’s side alongside Krile, the Lalafell and the Speaker fighting to keep the Miqo’te alive as the fistfighter begged the conjurer to stay with her. Both Ala Mhigans in that pile were beaten up and bleeding at least somewhat severely, but neither of them cared, applying as much pressure as they could while Lahabrea and Krile gave instructions to them.

A shattered axe, a snapped katana, and now a bent lance were already scattered on the ground as the Warrior of Light went as far as throwing their bow at the Garlean who but played with his food. Hythlodaeus had collapsed into the dirt, one of his legs twisted beyond its breaking point and the other’s upper thigh having been run through with a katana. A simple wound that bled aggressively, with Elidibus hunched over him as he tried to stem the flow of blood. Half a Miqo’te tail cut off and one ear sliced clean in half, with fresh blood having caked his mask that he had been forced to toss it away.

The little Warrior and the little Oracle had put up quite a fight—the girl was surprisingly skilled with a gunblade of Garlean make, but even her ferocity availed naught if she was forced to play a Warrior of Light. The boy meanwhile had had the unfortunate luck of dodging a blow meant to sever his head just slowly enough that the blade had cut across his face, one side’s eye likely beyond saving if they continued playing mortal.

The Exarch was hunched over, holding his staff up but unable to move, desperately whispering the words to simple healing spells so that he could fix the gash in his side that was just high enough that it meant that someone trying to heal him could likely see the crystal spreading across his upper body.

Heavens, he hated playing by mortal rules. And he hated mortals for their ridiculous rules as he heard a war cry just as Zenos raised his arm to smash the shield that the Warrior of Light had conjured up and was ready to smash into the Garlean’s face for all they cared. By the heavens, he hated mortals so much as he watched the Scion Lyse push herself to her feet in a blind rage that made her ignore her blood loss and the pain stemming from her injuries. She hurled herself across the gore-stained dust to land a kick in Zenos’ back—enough to make him stop his attack on the Warrior of Light. Enough to make him turn.

Emet-Selch fumbled for his weapon. Pulled the trigger as the sword descended upon the dazed Lyse.

The bullet missed its target.

The blade hit another target instead.

Elidibus had, from his relative position nearest to Zenos other than the Warrior of Light, disengaged from Hythlodaeus once he would no longer bleed to death by mortal standards. In a bizarre mirror act of what had happened atop Ishgard’s Vault, Elidibus shoved the Scion aside just as the Warrior of Light had shoved the knight aside. But Elidibus in his disguise had no massive sword to offer resistance against a weapon poised to kill. All he had was a fine staff doubling as a blade not meant for excess close-quarters combat—and his borrowed body.

The fine shatter of metal was accompanied by the sound of bone and flesh tearing. The Warrior of Light lunged forwards just as Emet-Selch dropped the gun once more. The impact at least sent Zenos staggering backwards a little and he dropped the blade—just as Elidibus, playing his role to perfection, dropped with a wet slap of some sort. No mortal could live through having their chest torn open like that. Not a single one. Once the heart was cut there was no returning from that.

Apparently being disarmed at least made his darling great-grandson behold the Warrior of Light as more than a mere savage beast. Perhaps a desperate beast.

Whatever nonsense about savouring this feeling of uselessness despite being so close to their friend Zenos muttered, he departed uncontested.

The Scion Lyse let out a shrill, hysterical screech as she dropped to her knees. For all she knew she had nearly killed her friend and fellow comrade from Sharlayan and actually gotten a Warrior of Light butchered right before her eyes. Those who could all fought themselves to their feet—Lahabrea to his credit only slammed one of his hands into his face and continued his work on keeping the Scion below him alive.

Hythlodaeus sat up with his entire face in a grimace of pain, and the little Oracle stumbled to her feet with the help of the little Warrior and dragged herself over to the Exarch.

“No, no, no! No! No! No, this—this can’t be happening!”

Ah.

The stage of shock and grief that came with hysterical, panicked laughter as bloody tears rolled down the Scion’s face. Behind them, the rest of their allies came running—from the infernal twins to the Ala Mhigans to the Antecedent and the Alliance. The boy twin pulled his book from its holster—the stage of shock and grief that came with denial, with the useless waste of energy to see if a clearly dead person could still be saved. At the very least his twin sister and the two Ala Mhigan fools stopped him.

The gross, wretched wail that escaped the Scion who Elidibus had just apparently given his life for was all sound that happened for the longest time. Even the movement slowed down; Lahabrea eventually walked on over to check on the Exarch. The Exarch who sat up properly and exchanged a long, long look with all his allies.

The Alliance members all scattered when the silence was broken by the Scion Krile—who said that others needed help here and that this was Scion business that they would take care of. But they needed a little bit of privacy; no fighting had taken place near the Temple of the Fist nor had any people hidden there.

Once it was only the Scions remaining, the Antecedent made a decision for them.

“Get up.”

That gave every present person not in on the ruse a start.

“Minfilia…?” the Lalafellin Echo-bearer asked, her voice soft despite her previous harsh ordering about.

“I said, get up.”

Confused muttering broke out—every person who could had somehow stood up by now—the sole exception being Hythlodaeus whose leg would not bear any weight any time soon if he played perfectly mortal.

“Minfilia, with all due respect, what by Rhalgr are you talking about?” The Ala Mhigan boy, Wilred or something, said with worry on his face.

But the Antecedent continued staring at the useless broken lump of torn flesh and bone that supposedly had once been the adventurer Emissary. An Allagan clone of the adventurer Exarch who stood holding onto the Warrior of Light’s arm. Alive.

“ _Would you be so kind as to ask politely, Antecedent?”_

The Scions who had no Echo startled—for all they knew, some strange entity nearby had suddenly spoken in a language they had no way of knowing for it sounded nothing like the languages spoken on the Source.

Minfilia meanwhile merely crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes. “The time for useless formalities has long passed, Emissary. Or should I say: Elidibus?”

She may as well have shot a cannon into the group. The pathetic soft wailing died in the Scion Lyse’s throat as she stared at the Antecedent with wide blue eyes. The Scions Krile and Arenvald, but _blessed_ with the Echo had understood what Elidibus had said and now stared at the supposed corpse—and indeed, Elidibus in his proper white robes, invisible to normal mortal eyes but in plain sight for those Hydaelyn had called to, shook his head and rolled his shoulders.

“E… _Elidibus!?”_ That was one of the twins, once again clutching his book in self-defence this time.

The Antecedent in the meanwhile had no intention of entertaining this farce any longer it seemed. The Warrior of Light snorted when she turned her piercing gaze towards Lahabrea.

“Get this nonsense over with, Ascian,” she hissed at the Speaker.

The shocked silence was almost comical as Lahabrea shrugged and knelt down next to the mangled body. Emet-Selch almost felt sorry for the Ala Mhigan girl as she gagged and desperately scrambled away as torn bone and tissue wove itself back together. What those without the Echo missed was Elidibus shrugging at Lahabrea once the body was restored; all they saw was the Speaker sighing in return.

And the comical shocked silence continued as the Emissary—the Ascian’s Emissary Elidibus this time, complete with proper robes and mask on his face, but with his hood down—sat up in the blood-stained dirt.

Minfilia nodded, then pointedly stared at Lahabrea—who sighed once again and shook his head. “Very well,” he said and put his hands together. Copying the way Elidibus did it, rather than his usual travel garb he revealed himself in the proper Ascian robes. Before Minfilia turned onto either of them, Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus near simultaneously snapped their fingers.

They glared at each other—Hythlodaeus’ robes missed some of the details they had added after the Sundering, but they were no mere Amaurotine communal robes.

With another sigh, the Crystal Exarch removed the bandages on his face and undid the clasps on the gauntlet that hid his crystalline arm. It fell to the ground with an almost deafening clatter.

The Warrior of Light, the Oracle of Light and the little Warrior of Light remained, now the centre of attention from the stunned Scions.

A defeated shrug was all they got from the Warrior of Light. “Sorry to disappoint—technically Ascians though we may be, we are not amongst the red-masked. I doubt we barely even qualify for the black-masked kind.”

The leader of the Scions narrowed her eyes. “Let us take this to the entrance to the Temple of the Fist. There is quite a lot we have to talk about. Now.”

* * *

“Now then, let us away with the fake identities before we start.” Of all the Scions, Papalymo had taken the reveal that there were Ascians among them the best. Then again, the Lalafell was too perceptive for his own good and had likely worked on a theory that had not quite reached a satisfactory conclusion no matter where he went ever since his return. His voice only shook ever so slightly as he asked.

Emet-Selch watched the Warrior of Light shrug again with a sigh before they took the burden of speaking first upon them.

“Meteor. Warrior of Light. La Noscean child of farmers, whose family history unfortunately includes at least one half-Garlean way before any sort of conquests under Solus zos Galvus broke out… but from a future that we hope does not come to pass.”

Rather than letting the Scions chew on that, the Exarch drummed his actual fingers on the back of his crystalline hand. “Archon G’raha Tia of the Students of Baldesion. Historian. Descendant of the Allagan Royal Family via Princess Salina of the Saria branch and her closest confidant G’desch Tia. Uhm… Lord of the Crystal Tower and Exarch of the First’s Crystarium… from a future that already had to be changed once and now needs to be changed again.”

“I know not what name I was given when I was born,” Ryne followed it up surprisingly confidently, “and for a while I was called Minfilia, the First’s Oracle of Light. I hail from a future that had best never come to pass for the good of all, but I have since been given the name Ryne by… n-never you mind that. Ryne. My name is Ryne, Oracle of Light.”

“Unukalhai of the Thirteenth, which you know better as the Void. One of its many failed Warriors of Light, given the choice between oblivion and un-life. I chose the latter in hopes of one day returning the light to the lightless abyss.” He merely closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. “Lord of a lesser rung of Voidsent, which I took over by butchering the very leader who once left me to bleed to death in my world on the brink.”

Elidibus tapped one of his clawed fingers against his mask. “My role is that of the Emissary Elidibus—lest you wonder, the names you know us by are but titles. I do not believe that I require a reintroduction, seeing as I have made certain to keep those events mostly intact. Let me but reiterate that once you know of our goals, I can assure you that they will be one and the same.”

Emet-Selch sighed and opened his mouth—only to be interrupted.

Apparently Hythlodaeus was not going to let himself get overshadowed by the Lahabrea and Solus reveal about to take place. “The title I bear is that of Gerun, Seer. Mind you, I have not been affiliated with my fellow Ascians since longer than your history books reach, though I presume my crime of inaction against them weighs just as heavily as any and all atrocities they committed.”

Lahabrea crossed his arms before he spoke, his tone as neutral as was required of a Speaker. “I suppose I should not require a verbal reintroduction.” And with that, he revealed his sigil. The red flare vanished after a few moments. “But let me do my duty regardless: The Seat of the Speaker Lahabrea is mine and has been mine since time immemorial to mortals such as you.”

Ah.

He glared at his supposed allies—of course they would leave the worst news for last. Traitors one and all.

Still, he had to play along; although this was hardly a play any longer. Someone had set the stage on fire and the actors were now calling for each other with their actual names.

“Titleholder of Emet-Selch, Architect. Which, I presume, is much like Gerun a name unheard of even amongst the learned Scions—considering that an Architect must needs beholden that which they create. Your history books know me by many names, and they have forgotten just as many since; perhaps it would be easiest to simply state the latest. It is a pleasure to meet you, O Scions of the Seventh Dawn; my title may be Emet-Selch but you know me better by the name of Emperor Solus zos Galvus of Garlemald.”

Silence.

Emet-Selch rolled his eyes.

“Yes, I know the unspoken accusation. Yes, Garlemald was created to be volatile. No, don’t you dare accuse me of how this one particular man turned out; not even the most loving of families could have made him aught less than a little freak.” Not that his failure of a—not that Solus’ failure of a grandson had tried particularly hard after hundreds of attempts failing.

Still, silence.

It took quite a while before anyone dared speaking; and of course it was the one Scion he expected to speak first.

The Lalafell who, according to the Warrior of Light, should have been dead by this point.

“… Were there ever adventurers by the names that you went by that have been forcibly taken over, or has this been an elaborate ruse from the start?”

Lahabrea took a very decided step backwards—the silent, Amaurotine way of the Speaker telling the Emissary that he was yielding the podium to him.

Elidibus merely closed his eyes. “The injuries and the resulting required rest were, for the most part, indeed a ruse. There are exceptions to that rule, of course—I did tell you as much when I approached the Antecedent shortly after Gaius van Baelsar’s defeat; there were wounds Lahabrea in particular had to lick for a while.” He tilted his head to the side slightly as he opened his eyes again. “To answer your question more precisely, there are two people who existed previously to the adventurers. The child of La Noscean farmers who called themself Meteor, and the Student of Baldesion G’raha Tia—our master of arms over there and I.”

Before any Scion could ask an idiotic question, Elidibus crossed his arms once more and twitched the ear that had been half sliced off.

“But to explain this in detail, we need more time than we have. More privacy than we currently have. I will keep this as short as humanely possible not for our sake nor for yours, but for the sake of those wounded survivors that may need a hand. The report of the Primal Alexander’s tale all of you have read or heard in passing, correct?”

Mute nodding.

“Then this sorry tale of an alliance begins, mhm, in the not so distant future following a Calamity and the Umbral Era’s unsung heroes working on a way to use that which had been learned during the Alexander expedition to turn back the hands of time….”

* * *

“So, let me get this straight.”

He had to hand it to the Leveilleur who had taken her sweet time to return to the Scions—she was just as intelligent as her brother, but in an almost charmingly brute way. In Amaurot she would have made a shockingly efficient orator that may have rivalled Lahabrea due to the way she seemed to fill her space and how her voice carried.

“The Exarch hails from a timeline where an Eighth Calamity destroyed most of the star and left it reeling. He was sent back in time to prevent said Calamity from occurring—and _succeeded._ This you called the New Era timeline, from which you yourself as well as Meteor and Oracle hail. Then catastrophe on a scale that even you, a bloody _Ascian,_ never quite imagined struck and forced you to strike an alliance to see this _massive_ disaster fixed. In doing so, you unravelled bits and pieces of history in an attempt to keep a balance, which included ensuring the survival of certain key players. Key players being Speaker—Lahabrea—as well as Architect, Seer and Comet who hail from this timeline. You called it the Prime timeline. Which of course brings you here. Does that about sum this _insanity_ up?”

Elidibus nodded, and Alisaie pinched the bridge of her nose. A soft complaint about intellectuals and completely deranged stories that seemingly had no flaws, judging from how Papalymo and Alphinaud were clearly thinking and not finding anything to poke holes into. The Lalafell and the young Elezen were indeed standing there with thoughtful expressions and crossed arms, scrunching up their faces on occasion and shaking their heads. It reminded Emet-Selch of the better days where completely nonsensical problems had to be taken care of the by Convocation.

“I cannot quite say I fully understand,” the Scion Krile said and shook her head, “but I do have a question regarding the state of… G’raha Tia. Times two.”

The Exarch closed his eyes with a heavy sigh. “History is the same up to a certain diversion point. Until the Seventh Calamity it matters not which G’raha Tia it is, they all lived the same life. It is that point where the diversion occurs—the Prime G’raha becoming a vessel for the Ascian Elidibus much as Thancred and Solus Galvus became one for the Ascians Lahabrea and Emet-Selch. I am the G’raha Tia of the Eighth Calamity timeline, a Student of Baldesion specialised in Allagan history whose single-minded pursuit of Allag revealed him of royal descent and who made the choice to lock himself in slumber within the Crystal Tower to ensure that in the future people had the means to control it should they ever open its doors again. The New Era G’raha Tia likewise lived that life, but was left asleep in his tower until very likely the moment that Hydaelyn and Zodiark destroyed the Source.”

“Lest you wonder,” Elidibus said surprisingly calmly, “in the event of two of the same soul being present, the stronger will consume the weaker. Prime G’raha Tia would have died sooner or later with the Eighth Calamity G’raha Tia present either way. This… body was without soul long before Zenos yae Galvus, ah, filleted its heart in a single swipe.”

“… Which brings me to the next question,” Alphinaud said and turned to look at Lahabrea.

Lahabrea blankly stared back.

“I have studied restorative magic enough to know that fixing an injury like this as effortlessly as you did should be impossible. The only civilisation ever capable of such in small instances was Amdapor and we all—”

“Yes, I made certain that them going that far violated the laws given to them by the Elementals whose forests they settled,” Lahabrea said flatly. “As for why my particular brand of magic appears Amdapori to your eyes, Alphinaud—I am, technically, the father of white magic as it was used in the War of the Magi. I did not ‘perfect’ it but rather those I taught did; yet none of them saw it for what it was: a method of constructing their own downfall through sheer, unrelenting hubris much like Emet-Selch designed Mhach. As for what should be possible and what should not; I suppose the particular branch of magic I use is not merely rule-breaking by your standards but incorporates several things belonging to other schools of magic.”

Alisaie complained that her head was starting to hurt from all this specific babbling, and thanked the Twelve that Urianger was not present for this nonsense. She was quickly reminded by Papalymo that someone would have to tell the Scions who had stayed beyond Baelsar’s Wall of this.

It was again Papalymo who seemed rather displeased with something about this, and Emet-Selch could not help but grin as he watched the Lalafell cross his arms and turn to the Antecedent.

“… Minfilia, if I may… how come _you_ knew their true identities? That was not covered by the Ascian.”

A long, long sigh made every head turn towards Hythlodaeus.

“This pedantic need for the full picture when there are more pressing matters on hand will see us all killed—genuinely killed, mind you, you already have the technology needed to undo us. Yours truly here, with the help of Emet-Selch over there, pulled her from the Lifestream. Now, you all know the little issue with falling into the Lifestream either by accident, design, or _divine_ intervention. The Antecedent has spent an abnormally long time in the Lifestream comparatively. By all means, she is as much Ascian as any of us are on paper: an entity above the usual mortals in the sense of being undying, visible only to those blessed with the Echo in states of lacking a vessel, and possessing dead bodies at the very least or even properly living beings to attain a physical form.” He shook his head. “You may of course thank your grand Mothercrystal for the state your beloved Antecedent is in; I doubt any one being would quite enjoy having its state rendered such. My condolences for the loss of your body, and welcome to the bloody club.”

“Wait. You speak as if you—”

“Oh, _please._ Do you truly believe us Ascians to be malevolent entities seeking revenge on the living? We are not revenants. Certainly not spirits either. Our bodies were lost in times so ancient that even our bones will since have crumbled to dust. Have you ever had to deal with the phantom pains of a body that was unarguably yours and that has been lost, and any and all replacements you could find are but cheap imitations?”

Lyse, who had been silent the entire time, clasped her hands over her head with a frustrated groan. “Do _any_ of you know how to speak in plain Eorzean of _any sort?”_

“Seconded,” Alisaie hissed, joined by Krile nodding and Alphinaud shrugging.

Heavens above, he was going to scream. Hythlodaeus had a point but he had ruffled feathers now—Lahabrea closed his eyes with a small sigh and Elidibus shook his head before slowly raising a hand to his face.

Someone needed to intervene _now_ , and unfortunately for him it seemed as if none of the mortal part of their little group seemed inclined to speak up. Therefore Emet-Selch used his Garlean height to his advantage and put his hands on Hythlodaeus’ shoulders with a crooked smile.

“Thank you ever so kindly for your input, Seer. It is much appreciated as always, but unfortunately for you, your brusque way of speaking is seen as an insult.” If looks could kill, ah, Emet-Selch would have died a death so brutal it would have looped around to being _divine._ “In less flowery, decidedly Gerun-esque words, dear Scions… we Ascians did indeed once have bodies like yours. In fact, our people once shared the same physical traits as so many of your _Spoken_ do, and many others were by definition _Beastmen,_ too. What Gerun in particular jabs at in his backwards ways is the fact that no matter how close we can get via possession, none of these bodies are _truly_ ours. I certainly was not Garlean, and neither was Lahabrea a Hyur. Elidibus certainly was not merely a Miqo’te either. Gerun,” he said and raised one hand to pull on one of Hythlodaeus’ Elezen ears, to which the Seer responded with a yelp and a swung fist, which Emet-Selch ducked out of the way of, “was not merely an Elezen brat either.”

He very much enjoyed the confused looks that the Scions shot the Ascians. That revelation did not quite fit into their view—not that the Warriors of Light had done anything to combat it.

“Well, thank you, uh, Your Radiance,” Lyse said with a defeated shrug.

Emet-Selch pinched the bridge of his nose. “By your Twelve, girl, leave it at Architect. If this were a stage play, Solus zos Galvus would have finished his part until the curtain falls.”

For a moment, Lyse chewed on his words.

Then he watched her expression go from confused and upset to plain burning fury.

“Oh, so now the Ascian is going to preach to the Ala Mhigan!? This entire situation would not be taking place as it does had _you_ not _been_ Solus Galvus in the first place! This is _ridiculous,_ and I am not about to get treated like an idiot by someone who very directly had their bloody hands in getting us into this mess in the first place!”

“She’s got you there,” Hythlodaeus hissed and crossed his arms.

The confused atmosphere shifted to displeasure and anger that either steamed and broiled below the surface, or very openly came to surface with Lyse. Most groups had someone who said that the others were thinking without a thought wasted on appearance, and ever since she had shed her disguise this girl in particular had tried to be true to her emotions in more ways than one.

“This entire situation is ridiculous, in fact! As Scions of the Seventh Dawn we all have devoted ourselves to stopping Ascian machinations in particular, and you assisted us for the longest time! Which can only mean that you have been _using us,_ likely to further your own ridiculous plots and ploys!”

A loud stomp immediately made all eyes turn.

For the entirety of this conversation, the Warrior of Light had been shockingly quiet. It was a direct mirror of how Alexis tended to react to arguments of some scale; their abrasive silence often the perfect wall to bounce frustrations off of. But much like the friend he realised he missed quite a lot by this point, the Warrior of Light quite literally knew when to put their foot down.

“I understand your frustration, Lyse. I am too. But perhaps it is best if we start again from the top.”

Lyse narrowed her eyes at them, and Emet-Selch started to have a bad feeling about this.

“I can believe time travel. There have been odder things—”

But the Warrior of Light shook their head. Suddenly those familiar blue eyes looked threatening in a strange way—and Emet-Selch realised with a jolt of horror that something had been glossed over this entire conversation. The Antecedent also crossed her arms—that woman was too intelligent for her own good.

“… What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“The top. Nothing regarding the Seventh Umbral Era or the Seventh Astral Era. No Astral Era or Umbral Era, in fact. The top as in time before time. When the Ascians walked the earth in their own bodies.”


	70. INTERLUDE XII: Astral Scions, Umbral Sinners I

[…] History as a whole is fascinating, but something about how things changed following the Sundering is particularly interesting to compare to ours. It is a clear preservation of the people as they were, condensed into a single moment and then letting them develop all over again from a similar enough starting point. There are of course key differences between the people, and as any Spoken race can attest, much of history is lost even with painstaking measures taken to preserve it. Reading about it is different than having lived or recorded it and nuance will be lost along with how the people in general lived.

Before the Sundering can be spoken about in detail, one must remember the world as it was—the nuance has since been lost, its histories forgotten unlike the catastrophe that saw itundone. 

Of course, no city can be built without the people to lay the foundation. That much holds true now and has held true for longer than any recorded history knows. The following pages will contain what the Unsundered spoke of until their mouths were dry and headaches plagued them in shorter form to give you an idea what the world has once been like.

**Amaurotine**

**Modern name:** Hyur  
**Ancestral home:** the Amaurot Coast, the Dia Marshlands and the floating island Achora above the Stygian Bay; Dia Continent  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** Vylbrand, Mor Dhona

Like their modern equivalent, one of the most wide-spread people of their time. Unlike modern Hyurs, however, only those living in the City of Amaurot were referred to as Amaurotine; those born or living in other places referred to themselves as Lowlanders or Highlanders. Hardy, stubborn, but overall welcoming people with a strange pre-disposition for the Sorcery School of Creation. After several incidents on the comparatively wild Dia Continent a group of fourteen Amaurotines decided to lay the foundation of a city where they all could live together; a city they named Amaurot after the coast it was originally built on and that later also encompassed most of the Dia Marshlands and the Achora islands. But the Amaurotines were not people to stay put for long and travelled everywhere and nowhere. Due to their wide spread and large numbers finding a purely Amaurotine family tree was a nigh impossibility—just as finding a family tree _without_ at least one part-Amaurotine was surprisingly hard.

**Atlantean**

**Modern name:** Elezen  
**Ancestral home:** the Shellswept Coast, the Gold Ocean, the Spectrehaunt Depths; Phantasm Continent  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** Nagxia, the Glass Ocean, the Ruby Sea

Unlike Elezen, the Atlanteans were used to tropical temperatures due to having settled the Shellswept Coast. Pacts with their fellow waterborne Spoken allowed them to build the underwater city Atlantis which was famed for its striking beauty due to looking as if it were built in glowing underwater amphoras. While not waterborne Spoken they were eventually considered such by the people they shared the Gold Ocean and the Spectrehaunt Depths with; a long and lasting friendship that held true even through any and all hardships and survived until the Sundering amongst the few survivors. A large number of Atlanteans eventually developed a sensitivity to light due to living underwater for so long, making them a rarity outside of Atlantis and the surrounding smaller underwater cities. Those who chose to live elsewhere were referred to as the Coast Atlanteans while those who remained underwater were called the Amphora Atlanteans.

**Children of Sirius**

**Modern name:** Miqo’te  
**Ancestral home:** Archades and the surrounding Archadian mountains and Archadian Seas; Phantasm Continent  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** Thavnair, the Sirensong Sea

Modern voices would call the Children of Sirius Astrologians, but what they employed in the end was a highly specialised subsidiary of the Sorcery School of Creation. While modern Seekers of the Sun and Keepers of the Moon are diurnal and nocturnal, the Children of Sirius were mostly nocturnal due to their reliance on the stars. All was written and could be traced, and the Lady Fate ushered Her stargazing children to safety under Her guiding star—so they believed, and so was their home built. Stout believers of fate, the Children of Sirius were united under a council leadership led by the High Stargazer. Archades in particular rivalled Amaurot in terms of sheer size, and many a bloodline in ancient times had at least one Child of Sirius in it somewhere.

**Saronian Marcher, Saro**

**Modern name:** Lalafell  
**Ancestral home:** Gaea Heights, Saronia; Dia Continent  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** Gyr Abania

While traits inherent to Plainsfolk and Dunesfolk were present in ancient times, the Saro never quite bothered to differentiate. Nomads by nature, the closest modern equivalent to their lifestyle is that of the Xaela; the Saro however met at certain aetheric intersections across the Gaea Heights until eventually they built the city of Saronia at the central intersection. Their lifestyle was further supported by their natural predisposition to the Ambient School of Creation; they lived by the words that many modern Fae adopted as their own: give as much as is taken. For every bit of energy they siphoned out of their surroundings they made certain to repay the land for the power it gave them.

**Galg**

**Modern name:** Roegadyn  
**Ancestral home:** Fisherman’s Horizon, Nibelheim; Islands of Eternal Frost  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** Old Sharlayan

Merchants and historians, the Galg travelled the world by sea. While Atlantean vessels were seen as the most elegant and fastest the star had to offer, Galg vessels were seen are more reliant and sturdy. Harsh though the conditions on the Islands of Eternal Frost were, few people who visited thought Nibelheim’s buildings made of ice as anything but marvels to behold. The more agreeable climate in Fisherman’s Horizon eventually saw the small port city become a massive city filled to the brim with goods and knowledge from around the star. The Galg considered themselves stewards of history and knowledge but also insisted that it was to be shared so that the present could be made a better place with knowledge of the past.

**the Volcana (Steelheart, Flareseeker) **

**Modern name:** Au Ra  
**Ancestral home:** the Phoenix Roost mountain range, Ifrita’s Rest, the Twin Cities of Steel and Flame Alexandria and Bodhum; Phantasm Continent  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** the Dalvalan Grath, the Azim Steppe, the Burn

As the story goes, the volcanic mountains were gifted to the people of steel hearts who sought flames by the gods under the condition of them being able to cross the mountains. One who called himself Raincaller with his phantom Quetzalcoatl helped the people of burnt scales and of the forged scales achieve such, and the group divided into the white-scaled Steelhearts who founded Alexandria on the western side of the mountains and the black-scaled Flareseekers who founded Bodhum on the eastern side. They were stubborn and proud, often perceived as recluse due to the Flareseeker’s strict refusal to let outsiders live in their volcanic valley. Steelhearts were more widely spread yet retained the stubborn pride that marked the Volcana. Over time, the shared name of their people all but faded into history books, with Steelhearts and Flareseekers referring to themselves as such no matter where they lived.

**Lunarian**

**Modern name:** Viera  
**Ancestral home:** the Floating City of Babil; the Floating Continent  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** the skies of Ilsabard

As the legend goes, the Lunarians were assisted by spirits of wind to conquer and settle the Floating Continent they had watched from their small island home. Babil as a city was split into countless smaller districts all scattered across the Floating Continent, all of them going by the name Babil. Much like the Children of Sirius, the Lunarians were often nocturnal due to the moon playing a large role in their society. Perhaps seen as a little unsettling were their eyes that glowed in the dark as long as it was not a New Moon; a trait all of them took mischievous pride in. Lunarians were devoted to their chosen homes to a degree often detrimental to their own well-being but they were nowhere near as recluse as modern Viera are.

**the Watchers**

**Modern name:** Hrothgar  
**Ancestral home:** Insomnia, Lucis; Phantasm Continent  
**Approximate modern equivalent:** the underground of Ilsabard

Vows of eternal silence were not uncommon with the Watchers, whose gazes were piercing in more ways than one. Yet despite all this, one would be hard-pressed to find a people more enjoying the then and now in ancient times than them; their attitude often jovial and optimistic. Their underground city of Insomnia spread across most of what in modern days is called Ilsabard, one branch of the city even leading as far as towards the sole earth-bound part of Babil. The Lunarians and the Watchers enjoyed a close bond with each other and the Children of Sirius as well as some of the more adventurously travelling Saronian Marcher families. […]

* * *

[…] Most preserved remains the history of Amaurot, from its foundation days to the very day the Sundering split the star into many. Considering themselves the stewards of the star itself, Amaurot and its people very rapidly expanded after their founding days to a size that nowadays would beggar belief.

But any one settlement needed a leadership, and the Founders of Amaurot counting fourteen were asked to continue watching the city as it grew. In honour of these people who devoted their lives to the most important parts of building and maintaining a city, the following members of the so-called Convocation of Fourteen took their given names as the titles of their designated seat.

Modern history knows the last members of the Convocation of Fourteen—down to Thirteen after a major disagreement—as the Ascians, whose actions have long haunted and injured the Stars in ways that words can ill describe.

Among those Fourteen, four escaped the Sundering, one abandoned his fellow Unsundered, and the remaining three saw to becoming quite literal world-destroying villains who would later join hands with the Scions of the Seventh Dawn as temporal allies to stave off a greater evil.

As follows is what the four Unsundered said about themselves in summary.

**Elidibus, Emissary**

**Birth name:** Ophion

**General history:** The child of a family made of Children of Sirius and Saro, Ophion of Amaurot very quickly realised he had an interest in the Ambient School of Creation and set out to become a Siphoner. Somewhere along the way he became the personal student and assistant to the previous Emissary Elidibus and was confirmed as the title’s successor in the wake of the previous Emissary’s voluntary sacrifice to see Amaurot saved. The second-oldest of the Unsundered yet the one who has held his title for the least amount of time.  
**Role in Amaurot:** An Emissary is a politician first and foremost, but they are also tasked with being a voice of reason within the Convocation should the need for neutral ground arise.

**Role after the Sundering:** His duties barely changed; he continued being a voice of reason within the Ascians while also taking over tactical duties and keeping track of the Source’s Warriors of Light in particular. Following the disaster of the Thirteenth, Elidibus in particular made certain that elemental balance was kept until the scales could be nudged towards a Rejoining without endangering the Source’s integrity.  
**Involvement with the Scions:** As one of the initial four time travellers, Elidibus sought to prevent the death of his brethren as well as the unplanned and pre-emptive awakening of Zodiark.

**Lahabrea, Speaker**

**Birth name:** Quetzalcoatl

**General history:** One of the exceedingly rare half-Flareseekers, Quetzalcoatl rapidly became infamous throughout the city for his intelligence and debating skills that rivalled people several millennia his elders. Rather than rest on countless laurels, he worked to be recognised as rare master of all Schools of Creation—yet his personal favourite remained the Phantom School of Creation that his father’s ancestry favoured. Stubborn like only Flareseekers can be, it was his persistence that eventually saw Bodhum agree to certain mutually beneficial terms and arrangements. Despite all this, he continued being an orator at Akademia Anyder as if any of his achievements were but small incidents. The oldest of the Unsundered and the one who held his title for the longest time.  
**Role in Amaurot:** The Speaker’s duty is that of effectively being the Convocation’s mouthpiece as well as debating those who raise their concerns about the city and its handlers.

**Role after the Sundering:** The once calm debater very rapidly spiralled into becoming a wildfire that sought to consume all in its path. By the time certain time travellers arrived, the fires had turned to instead consuming the one who had set them in the first place. He saw himself as the senior who ought to be the one doing the heavy lifting, the one to commit all these atrocities rather than the younger generation.  
**Involvement with the Scions:** Taking possession of the Scion Thancred Waters, he was all but coerced into joining the cause temporarily by his fellow Unsundered after his defeat at the Warrior of Lights’ hands.

**Emet-Selch, Architect**

**Birth name:** Hades

**General history:** As an Amaurotine, his natural predisposition towards the Sorcery School of Creation was to be expected, yet none could have predicted the overwhelming power that Hades would attain with little effort. One of the few Amaurotines to have naturally sharp Aethersight. Despite him being only the second choice for the seat of Emet-Selch, he rapidly proved to be an excellent choice with his cold, analytical nature and his strangely relaxed way of listening to concerns which he dispelled swiftly and precisely.  
**Role in Amaurot:** The Architect was, naturally, tasked with seeing the city’s expansions and revisions done correctly. While technically under his jurisdiction, the Bureau of the Architect had nothing to do with the architectural creation process that Emet-Selch dealt with. The second-youngest Unsundered who held his position the second-longest.

**Role after the Sundering:** An Architect creates—and Emet-Selch is directly responsible for countless empires and kingdoms of note throughout history. A long, bloody trail that goes from one Calamity to the next, all accentuated by Warriors of Light risen to break the Architect’s creations apart.  
**Involvement with the Scions:** Perhaps the most amicable of the Unsundered, Emet-Selch had reached a point where he grew tired of the Sundered and his duties both. A promise of an interesting show that the Sundered were worthy of the world was enough to convince him to not interfere and lend a hand to this temporary alliance.

**Gerun, Seer**

**Birth name:** Hythlodaeus

**General history:** Despite being mostly of Lunarian descent, the only two things that gave this heritage away were his absurd height and the pale red eyes that glowed in the dark. Otherwise, he looked very much Atlantean by birth much like his father—the previous Elidibus. Incapable of controlling the selfsame powers that the other Unsundered control with ease; most people said that he would have most heavily leaned towards the Sorcery School of Creation. Blessed—or cursed if one were to ask him—with the gift of foresight and an Aethersight that outdid that of the greatest Sorcerer of his time, Gerun’s approach to life was flippant, dismissive and aggravatingly jovial thanks to him knowing the outcome either way. Initially the first choice for Emet-Selch, he turned the seat down mostly out of spite and partially because he knew his childhood friend to be the better choice. Interestingly, he accepted the seat of Gerun mostly to spite his own father, and proved a prickly but excellent titleholder. Among the Unsundered, he has held his position the second-shortest amount of time and is the youngest by a small margin.  
**Role in Amaurot:** The Seer is a position that often proves difficult to track; much like the first Gerun any subsequent Seer chooses how to serve the city best within their skills. Many travelled, others assisted where they could—the last Gerun to hold the title was often accused of being contrarian despite using his foresight to serve the city best. The missing Fourteenth member of the Convocation, his disagreement with the plan to save Amaurot saw him vacate his seat without naming a successor.

**Role after the Sundering:** Despite being Unsundered, he intended to have no hand in what the others planned. While he crops up in the pages of history on occasion, most infamously through _The Gerun Oracles,_ he seemingly preferred to stay out of Sundered business unless he was half-heartedly acting against his fellow Unsundered.  
**Involvement with the Scions:** Foresight being fickle, the attempts to prevent catastrophe clouded his sight; something that had not occurred since the very events that saw the Star sundered. Curiosity killed the coeurl—or drove the Seer back to his fellow Unsundered in this peculiar case that is further explained in the report pertaining to _Primal Nature_. […]

* * *

[…] If given the chance, I doubt not that many of us would choose to do the same for the people we love.

Yet at the same time, it is completely out of the question to see their actions as anything but reprehensible. Understandable but reprehensible.

That, dear readers, is the conclusion that we, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, reached in the end. We understood the motive but could not find it in our hearts to forgive them. It was not our place to forgive them on behalf of each and every single soul to begin with. We made our own judgements, and we implore you do the same.

Yet at the same time sometimes working with the lesser devil is required of those that seek to lead the land to a brighter tomorrow—and that is the decision we made in the end. That is the decision the Eorzean Alliance agreed to despite having their own concerns. […]

_From “Astral Scions, Umbral Sinners – A Report on Ascians, Calamities, and the Star” by Minfilia Warde_


	71. ACT X: Incidentally Unintentionally Futuristical Ally, Part 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're wondering where in the world I have been,  
> around my birthday I get existentially dreadful and 2 days before that, Ishgard Restoration started, I helped figure out expert crafts for a friend who really wanted Saint, stickbugged so hard I accidentally catapulted myself to Saint range too and then got  
> strangely competitive  
> to the point of utter physical and mental exhaustion. BC I was only doing expert crafts and nothing else because Somehow, SOMEHOW, I chose one of the more competitive crafters on my forsaken hellscape of a server.
> 
> Anyway, I'm a Saint of the Firmament on Moogle's final Culinarian rankings now.  
> I've Got A Few Regrets, Yes, Thank You.

To say the next few hours were interesting was quite an understatement, all things considered. Any and all goodwill that the Warriors of Light had gained with the Scions seemed to have both evaporated and increased at the same time. Confusion was the general consensus from the members of the Alliance who were aware of Ascian machinations. Elidibus deliberately stayed out of sight until all was clear, and immediately following that, the more recently arrived twin in particular made certain to stay away from the Warriors of Light. The only one who seemingly had no qualms whatsoever staying with supposed Ascians was young Alphinaud, but he caught that the boy seemed a little more guarded. He was the Scion who had technically spent the most time with the Warriors of Light after all, but he was not fool enough to let his guard down around newly revealed Ascians. Clever kid.

Krile, meanwhile, simply took the opportunity and demanded Lahabrea’s immediate attention. A healer was a healer, she reasoned when asked what on good earth she wanted to do with this Ascian, and it mattered little to her that he was Lahabrea. There were people in need of succour and she needed help granting it; whether she liked it or not Lahabrea was the next best choice to make here.

Hythlodaeus watched with a raised eyebrow as a clear crystalline pop followed by a wisp of flame unfolding wings told that the Speaker had apparently regained enough of his focus to bring back his masterpiece on a much smaller scale.

He hated admitting it, but Hythlodaeus owed his life to this creature. Many did, and in his delirious state he had hardly recognised anything but the bird before blessed silence took him. Lahabrea was far from the Healer, but his methods were effective. Something that the mortals recognised as well. Although he had to draw a line and said that he would not be expending energy to save lost causes. Frankly, seeing this in motion was bizarre—he had written off the phoenix as Lahabrea had first envisioned it lost for all eternity.

Upon closer inspection, however, he noticed that time and the mental erosion of its creator had not passed the creature by completely. Claws where none were needed. A beak much too sharp to be considered a harmless bird. Sleeker, more battle-ready design with less grandiosely coloured and pointlessly pretty feathers that seemed to each roil and crackle like fire. It was plainer, smaller, meaner. Its movements were choppier, sluggish whenever Lahabrea ordered it to heal.

The reaction was the same as it had ever been, however. Relieved sighs. Relieved sobs. Choked-out thanks and sometimes bewilderment that wounds that had stung like hell or hurt so much they thought they were going to die were burnt away gently by a bird made of flame.

The Scion Papalymo watched the scene unfold with narrowed eyes.

Hythlodaeus crossed his arms and cleared his throat. “You seem vexed.”

The Lalafell closed his eyes with a small sigh. “Forgive me if I seem less than enthusiastic about being paired off with your ilk.”

He shrugged, fully aware just how crooked his smile appeared—good for him that the Scion stood there with his eyes closed. “For what it is worth, the three of the so-called Overlords of the Source have quite significantly changed ever since they were roped into this mess. To think that Lahabrea—”

“My concerns are not about Speaker… Lahabrea. If I may be so frank, they are about you. Ascians labour for a Calamity, that much we have learned extensively. Yet here _you_ stand, arguably more dangerous than any of those three, yet somehow at the same time also the one who penned _The Gerun Oracles._ To put it lightly, I know not how to read you or how to understand you.”

A laugh. “You, and everyone else, Scion.”

A flash of fire in the distance as Lahabrea dismissed the phoenix. It seemed as if all that could be done had be done, and judging from the way the Scion Krile carefully put a hand against the Ascian’s leg it seemed as if Lahabrea’s limited energy reserves had once more been extinguished just as the flame of his trademark bird.

“For what it is worth, the ancient sport of ‘who can read the Seer best’ had only ever two winners, and both of them are long gone.”

“That sounds much too bitter for them to truly be gone.”

Further up ahead, Emet-Selch was all but cornered by a bandaged-up Lyse who seemed intent on learning all she could from the erstwhile emperor of Garlemald. Eventually just around the time she grew much too heated, the Warrior of Light put a hand on her shoulder and shook their head, saying something that Hythlodaeus could not hear from where he and Papalymo were standing. If he narrowed his eyes just enough, he could easily imagine Alexis and Hades to be standing there, discussing something of very little import with enough fervour to rival the Speaker in a heated debate. Long before Alexis’ mind slipped and they covered their trauma in countless animated weapons that Amaurotines called dark arts. Long before Hades vanished and left naught but the devour Zodiark servant Emet-Selch behind.

Long before Hythlodaeus as a concept stopped existing and only Gerun remained—Gerun, tethered to two primordial forces that kept the world in a dangerous, ever sliding and slipping balance.

He put a hand over his mouth as a wave of chastising nausea hit him.

“They are gone, I assure you,” he wheezed out through his fingers. “If you would excuse me.”

* * *

Historical integrity was necessary—that much even the Scions agreed to and then declined being told about what the future had in store. After all it was not entirely set in stone. Therefore, at Lyse’s behest, they returned to Revenant’s Toll to learn as much about the Far East as possible and to also fill in the Scions who remained at the Rising Stones just in case something happened. From the way the Exarch had his ears drawn back and how he kept fretting about possibly covering up the arm just in case it freaked other people out, it seemed as if he had never truly planned on revealing himself the way he had had in the end. It was amusing to watch at first, but eventually Hythlodaeus could not help but pity the poor fool. As he had learned, the Exarch had long yearned to return to the Source alongside the Scions and would have succeeded had he been given a little more time. But the pressing matter of their link between body and soul weakening as well as Elidibus’ underhanded tactics of driving the people away from the Warrior of Darkness and the Oracle of Light as completely on the good side people had crushed his attempts at bringing himself back to the Source with the other Scions.

To be honest, Hythlodaeus was much more interested in the explosion in the making between the Scion Thancred and Lahabrea. Exhausted as he was once again, the Speaker very much did not pose a threat. Metal bits and pieces clinked together as all of them moved into the Rising Stones—only to find it mostly empty.

With Yugiri’s departure, things had grown surprisingly quiet to begin with. But it seemed as if most of the Scions were out today, much to Lyse’s annoyance.

“Darn. I had hoped we could ask Thancred a thing or three about the Empire.”

A long, long pause. Lyse scratched the back of her head and very deliberately avoided looking at Emet-Selch.

Eventually it was the Warrior of Light who broke the silence. “Actually, I have a question. Regula van Hydrus, the—”

Emet-Selch immediately crossed his arms. “The foolish, infatuated legatus who once oversaw Doma?”

“… Infatuated,” Meteor deadpanned back and then shook their head. “Ugh, no, don’t. Do _not_ elaborate. Anyway, the man is alive and well. Are we to expect more than simply Zenos in the Far East?”

Hythlodaeus crossed his arms and glowered at Emet-Selch for the entire conversation. The arguments made against van Hydrus appearing on active duty all made sense, of course. He was not going to fault the Architect’s sharp as always logic. No, what he was faulting him for with the silent glaring was the fact that the petty hatred for his former vessel’s grandson was frankly put ridiculous. As if the orphaned child had personally slaughtered his father.

Granted, Hythlodaeus could very easily admit that he saw parts of himself in the way Varis had turned out. Petty, ridiculous desire to outdo their parents to show them that despite everything they turned out better than expected. Where Varis became a warlord who sought his equals to no avail, Hythlodaeus had easily become one of the most popular Chiefs of the Bureau of the Architect in history.

Eventually the group scattered to gather information about the Far East and Doma in particular, and Emet-Selch finally returned his glowering with a huff. “Yes, Gerun? Have anything constructive to add to the conversation?”

While certainly not the final nail in the coffin, Hythlodaeus debated whether to be this petty or not for a split second and decided that perhaps it was high time he permitted himself to be that petty. Without answering the passive-aggressive question he instead closed any and all distance between him and Emet-Selch, going as far as using one arm slung around Emet-Selch’s lower back to pull him close while the other hand was used to push the other’s chin up.

If any one person in this room turned to look at them, they would likely think that Hythlodaeus was about to kiss his fellow Unsundered. Judging from the almost comical surprise in his eyes for a moment, it seemed as if the Architect thought the same. If one were to ask him, Hythlodaeus would have quite _enjoyed_ doing so after so long apart.

But pettiness begot pettiness, and instead he leaned close, close enough that their faces were but a hair’s breadth apart and then gave Emet-Selch a smile that was more sneer than anything else.

“Would that I could travel through time as Elidibus did, why,” he whispered, “I would make certain that my foolish younger, happier self would never ask you to spend the rest of eternity with him. I thought myself Amaurot’s pettiest creator, but seems that I misjudged you, _Emet-Selch._ But I suppose that, too, is part of this eternally damning cycle of contradictions I find myself in. I love you, loved you enough to propose a shared eternity, and now I find myself so full of loathing I wish I could leave. But I cannot. Do me a _simple_ favour for _once_ in our unfortunately shared existence as two who have escaped the Sundering—stop asking my opinion on things you clearly know my thoughts on. And you would _certainly know_ the way I feel about your opinion on your former vessel’s grandchild. _I lived that hellish existence myself.”_

With that, he shoved Emet-Selch away from him and stalked out through the front door. Plenty of Domans were employed around the Toll and he could easily speak with them while the rest asked those inside the Rising Stones.

* * *

If one were to ask the Crystal Exarch, he would very likely say that the worst thing about their paper-thin cover being blown was the fact that now he had to all but open the Crystal Tower to the Scions, the Sons of Saint Coinach and the Students of Baldesion who voiced interest in it. At the very least it gave credibility to their claims of being time travellers—while both Cid Garlond and Nero Scaeva were unavailable, it were the members of the Garlond Ironworks who had poured over the Alexander reports who confirmed that there were similar mechanisms at work but they had no idea how someone had managed to replicate that without the help of the Primal itself.

It was in the middle of yet another unused, stunningly beautiful and hopelessly abandoned room that Lyse finally said what everyone else had been thinking for the longest time.

“I… I think it would be best if we split up. Or, well, you more precisely. Eight people in the Far East while… while the Resistance recovers seems ill-advised.”

Minfilia, who had been investigating some sort of control panel for something or other, put a hand on her cheek without turning around. “In which case I would have to request that Lahabrea stays in Eorzea. Thancred will be returning sooner or later and in the event of his return I do want this particular Ascian to be present.”

A low grumble, but Hythlodaeus caught the almost relieved shrug Lahabrea gave after a while. Of course—if history was to be believed, the Far East would take them to the Azim Steppe. The one place Lahabrea’s kind wound up after the Sundering even if he never quite felt kinship with his fellow Flareseekers.

It seemed to have opened some sort of floodgate. Unukalhai took a step backwards while Ryne nodded enthusiastically at Minfilia. “I want to go to the Far East. There were no continents other than Norvrandt left where I grew up—and while Eden took us back and forth across the Empty, nothing compares to a real different continent.”

“Whereas I would prefer staying behind.”

He caught the quick look the Warrior of Light shot the Exarch before they shrugged vaguely and then closed their eyes. “Far East for me.”

The Exarch shook his head. “I know not how far the Crystal Tower’s energy supply reaches. While I would love to see the Far East and Doma with my own two eyes, I am afraid I will have to remain.”

“In which case it would be best if I remained in Eorzea as well,” Elidibus said surprisingly softly.

“Oh, hells no,” hissed Emet-Selch just in the same moment that Hythlodaeus let out a long, weary sigh. “I _refuse_ to travel to the other end of the godsforsaken star with _him.”_

An even split with the preferences voiced meant that the group accompanying those going to the Far East consisted of the Warrior of Light, the Oracle of Light… and Emet-Selch and Hythlodaeus. And while he hated agreeing with him in that very moment, this was just about the last thing Hythlodaeus wanted as well. Yet at the same time he had to admit, he enjoyed the idea.

Alisaie tapped her foot against the crystalline floor for a moment and then rolled her eyes. “You get no say in the matter, Ascian. You and your fellow are coming to the Far East with us whether you want to or not—I agree that Lahabrea in particular has to remain here. The rest, fine by me. Papalymo has mentioned that he wanted to work with the… void mage. Literal void mage.” She raised her hands to her temples and put on an almost comical pout. “Heavens preserve me. I have seen many an odd thing in Eorzea since we arrived here, but I swear that grandfather would be turning in his grave over this mess.”

“Out of excitement, I hope you mean to say—he did quite enjoy working with odd cases, and this is just about the oddest case I have ever had the displeasure of witnessing,” Alphinaud chimed in and dodged a swing his sister took at him with a cackle. “But yes, I do agree with the Antecedent—although less because I wish to see, err, Thancred punching several new holes into Lahabrea but more because whether we like it or not he is a skilled healer and likely better off helping covert operations.”

Hythlodaeus watched Lahabrea’s exasperated expression grow grim. Any time else and the Speaker may have broken into an angry tirade about mortals, but to be frank: watching Lahabrea try to keep his temper was seventy times more hilarious than anything else.

The Antecedent meanwhile crossed her arms and cleared her throat.

“Objection overruled, Architect.”

Emet-Selch pinched the bridge of his nose. “Democracies, I swear. Very well. Do attend my funeral when this snake of a Seer inevitably turns me into mush.”

The Warrior of Light looked genuinely confused when Hythlodaeus laughed and spat out a “Do not act as if you would not enjoy that”. For all their faults and missing characteristics, they still were a remnant of Alexis. Which in turn meant they were observant when it came to the dynamic between people they knew—and as much as they likely hated admitting it, they had by now gotten to know any and all of their allies for better or for worse. And whether he liked it or not, it was obvious that he both still cared and wished he could simply stop associating with his fellow Unsundered. A pull in one direction, a pull in the other, and endlessly on and on he contradicted himself.

He was aware. Comically aware.

Antagonising Emet-Selch was fun but at the same time he could… simply stop doing it.

Judging from the stare the Warrior of Light was giving him, they had likely reached the same conclusion but yet lacked the understanding as to why he simply didn’t.

It would have been so easy to confess that he realised he missed _Hades_ and not _Emet-Selch,_ yet there was naught left but _Emet-Selch_ by this point. Instead Hythlodaeus shot the Warrior of Light a grin that made them blink in confusion.

* * *

The confusion in the Rising Stones was tangible.

The Lalafell in the centre of said confusion looked immensely, charmingly proud of herself, however. The rest of the Scions that had already been part of one such event all cackled somewhat.

But Tataru was not one to let her comrades go without a change of clothes, and she was one of the people who would be travelling to the Far East as well anyway.

“Seer in particular—pardon, Hythlodaeus, was it? He fights much as Lyse does, and your delightfully evil-looking robes do _not_ grant him enough movement freedom to fight as he usually does. Unless he secretly is some sort of Ascian grand mage. Are you?”

Hythlodaeus laughed. Loudly. “Hells, no. I would sooner set myself ablaze than manage igniting a candle, Miss Tataru.”

“And there you have it. Comet—Unukalhai—helped with keeping the general design in line with what you are used to, but the rest is more suited for combat and with certain specifications for all of you. So, the Seer’s garb. Long sleeves, padded shoulders and elbows. In order to keep the Ascian appearance intact somewhat, mid-length coattails with silver embroidery that are long enough to give the illusion of this being a robe while not getting in the way. Boots that are heavy enough to lend more strength to his kicks but not heavy enough to slow him down.”

Hythlodaeus snorted. This was somehow the most thoughtful gift he had received since long before the Sundering, and it was something as simple as travelling clothes. And just as the Lalafell had claimed, she had made certain to replicate as much of an Ascian robe as she could without overdoing it. Unukalhai beside her looked mighty proud of himself, too, but when Elidibus asked whether he had contributed beyond explanations, the boy immediately shook his head.

“That was all Mistress Tataru.”

“Speaking of which! White is important for an Emissary, or so I have been told. Since you fight in mid-range and are a mage with some mobility, yours is… honestly, simply your normal get-up. Although I did have some modifications made when I heard your explanation of what sort of magic you use.”

Elidibus held the robe up. “… Interesting. I would not have thought that you would think of laying some small crystal shards in the metal decorations.”

It was not noticeable from where Hythlodaeus stood, but it was plain to his aethersight. Littered across the entire robe were small pieces of crystal that had been carefully put into the metal parts; not enough to be immediately obvious to anyone but skilled enemy mages but more than enough that an economical siphoner like Elidibus could draw from it reliably. The amused twitch of his body’s tail gave away that Elidibus was rather impressed with the Lalafell’s handiwork—which she noticed but did not bring up. Her beaming smile was radiant either way.

“I have been informed that, err, time travel being at work here, Meteor already… has received something of this kind, and therefore I simply made certain to replace your broken weapons.” A sturdy, gleaming bow; a greatsword that appeared heavy enough to be a nuisance in combat; combat bracers that were shiny and new; a clearly Ishgard-made intricate but deadly lance; and a surprisingly light in comparison axe that Meteor took into their hands first and swung to test it out.

“Tataru, those must have cost a fortune,” the Oracle muttered and immediately regretted her words when Tataru merely gave her a wide grin. “… Or not.”

“I have my connections,” Tataru hummed out happily and nodded approvingly as Meteor took every weapon to test it out. “Now then, on to Oracle. Seeing as you still haven’t parted with that dingy gunblade you picked up on the battlefield, I made certain to commission the Garlond Ironworks for a better one. Still, seeing as you quite enjoy wearing white I made certain to keep your clothes suitably Oracle-esque, but you’re a close range fighter. Light leather padding under the clothes to give a small measure of protection. Holsters for both your knives and the gunblade.”

Ryne stared at it with gleaming eyes, thanking Tataru several times as she gathered everything up in her hands and ran off to Dawn’s Respite to put it on immediately.

“Now, Lahabrea. The least mobile of the mages. Apparently also a pyromaniac.”

“….”

Tataru giggled at the annoyed glare he shot her. “Ahaha, my apologies. But it is an important point. Specially treated to prevent any sort of fire-related accident. Much like Elidibus, it is effectively the same robe for all intents and purposes, except—”

She stopped when Lahabrea held up one long, thick glove that clearly was designed for one purpose. “Your thought process is _fascinating._ A falconer’s handgear, but designed for a larger avian.”

“Precisely so! Thick enough to protect you from your own bird’s claws, but still able to be put under the sleeves. Both hands, slightly less long sleeves.”

Much like Elidibus, Lahabrea seemed strangely pleased. Back in Amaurot the Speaker had been one of the few people to regularly wear gloves of any sort to deal with his often fire-aspected creations and while he had had the excess energy to keep the rest of himself from spontaneously catching on fire back then, Lahabrea in the current time did simply not have the energy reserves to do such. Tataru’s work was surprisingly thoughtful.

“Is this to your liking, G’raha?”

Hythlodaeus turned to look at the Exarch. While there was no way to hide the crystal creeping up his face, he had seemingly requested something to at least hide as much of it as possible.

“Krile said that you once used a bow, but seeing as you are but a mage of the red these days, Alisaie lent me a hand with designing a rapier for you. Light but sturdy since you spend more time casting spells than using the blade. I admit the blue pattern on the sword is a needless flourish, but I feel like it suits you. Especially since I absolutely did not want to go and chisel something off the Crystal Tower without your permission.”

From what he had seen in the Crystal Tower, this was a reprise of what he wore as the Crystal Exarch except more suited for travel and with a long, black glove hiding the crystalline arm nearly completely. And proper footwear.

Unukalhai meanwhile scratched the back of his neck. It seemed as if Tataru had correctly pinpointed him as the most mobile of the mages and barely adjusted his already travel-suited and Void-themed clothes.

“Proper long boots and legwear. The rest of your ensemble suits combat perfectly already—just as you requested.”

The boy thanked her awkwardly, still not quite a fan of being the centre of attention after all.

Which only left the most bristly of their merry little band. And certainly enough, Emet-Selch seemed to be bristling. Hythlodaeus could not even fault him for it this time around; sorcery as it was back in Amaurot usually meant that the sorcerer shed their mortal appearance as they gave themselves to the Underworld.

Indeed, Tataru seemed to be scrutinising his reaction for the longest time, and then simply sighed before procuring a staff from a shelf. Elegant, dark metal that seemed to be intertwined with and eventually gave way to what appeared to be dyed crystal. Deep, deep violet and stark black—and a bladed lower tip. A staff as much as it was a needlessly overdesigned lance.

“May this serve you well, Sorcerer,” was all Tataru said when the Ascian leaned down to at least pretend he was polite.

For someone used to working with either incredibly heavy staves back in Amaurot to not working with them at all after the Sundering, this one seemed to belong into Emet-Selch’s hands. Hythlodaeus had to admit that Tataru’s design was flawless in this one particular case; as much needlessly flourishing and gaudy as it was a genuine boon in battle.

For a while, a pleasant conversation took place. Lyse said that Wilred would be arriving soon to accompany the remainers to the Alliance headquarters in the Fringes. The rest, however, would have to depart as soon as the proper airship from the Garlond Ironworks arrived to take them to Limsa Lominsa. They had an appointment with a pirate to keep, after all.

Hythlodaeus pinched the bridge of his nose at that.

Pirates. Pirates and the Far East. And Emet-Selch.

This was both a nightmare and something he had joked about when they were both children.


	72. ACT XI: Where Our Hearts Remain, Part 1

History repeated for the most part unperturbed. Or it at least tried to happen the way it had happened before—as far as she could trust Meteor’s mildly annoyed reaction it seemed that their incident aboard the _Misery_ had been the same. She noticed that the Seer almost smugly glanced over at the bickering Emet-Selch and Meteor for a moment before shrugging and then sighing. “It is becoming clearer, mind you. The end result yet remains the same which means we are still missing key information. On the other hand, I have more than a vague idea what the last chain of events is going to be, and I cannot in good conscience forward it to you. Knowing the future can break people; which is why your Scions so wisely chose to not be told and instead chose to let history happen as it will happen. Leaving the heroics to the heroes; and the timeline to the time travellers.”

“That is perfectly ominous and dodging my question,” Ryne said.

They would be arriving in Kugane soon, the captain had said. The captain who was apparently an Ishgardian noble runaway of some sort. She had tried to use that opportunity to talk to Hythlodaeus about his foresight and the fact that it apparently had been completely thrown off the rails. But as always he gave her vague half-answers and danced around the question.

“And I repeat that knowing the future can break people.” Suddenly his tone had dropped from the general singsong to gravely flat. “Would you labour as hard as you do, knowing that it is all in vain? That there is no future to look forward to, that any and all promises made are not going to be promises kept? Of course not. No one would.”

With that, it seemed as if his interest in her flickered out like a candle in the wind. Instead he walked on over to pull Emet-Selch and Meteor apart, a strange familiarity to the movement that startled the Warrior of Light and seemingly enraged the Architect.

Ryne simply continued frowning.

* * *

It were the tales of the Source that she forwarded to Gaia later that made her always feel like she was still with the Scions. As far as Norvrandt and the Empty got, nothing quite matched these tales of wildly different cities all over the Source and they were a great way to pass the time as she and Gaia remained at the camp in the Empty overlooking Eden for a while. Slow and steady won the race, and while they would never live to see the fruits of their labour, Ryne wholeheartedly believed that one day they would be reborn in cities far, far from Norvrandt and would get to see their work without knowing it had been the both of them making this possible.

Kugane was certainly not like anything in Norvrandt. Perhaps Eulmore was closest to it, being a vibrant but controlled city after the night returned. But where Eulmore was bright and confused after an ending ringing in a new beginning, Kugane was almost comically stable in comparison. She was aware that she was looking around with too much enthusiasm to appear as anything less than a green westerner—but at the very least Alisaie humoured her enthusiasm for the city.

“You really were not kidding when you said that you hail from a place that barely escaped the end of the world, huh.” That was all the Elezen said before snatching a satchel that Ryne kept her money in from her hands and buying some sort of sweet that Ryne had never seen before for the both of them. The market was a busy place, and Alisaie’s scrutinising gaze continued wandering. “Finding someone who genuinely knows a thing might be harder than anticipated, though.”

Before Ryne could reply anything—not that Alisaie expected a reply—and in the middle of Alisaie reaching over to snatch a piece of what she had bought for Ryne, Alisaie froze for a moment. It was just a heartbeat, really, but Ryne followed her fellow Scion’s gaze to check whatever it was she was seeing. And surely enough, it was a small group of clearly Garlean soldiers marching back towards the Garlean embassy via the markets. Nothing unusual if the reaction of the locals was to be believed, but Ryne knew why Alisaie had frozen.

There was a legatus among the group.

She had not seen that armour design before—but Alisaie evidently had, judging from her reaction.

“Alisaie?”

“Uh? Oh. Never you mind that.” There was a short look that Alisaie shot her that seemed to say ‘do not bring this up in public’. “Say, Ryne, you know how to get back to where we’re staying?” Without waiting for an answer, Alisaie nodded and put her hands on her hips. “There is something I need to check. Seeya later, Ryne!”

And just as suddenly as she had frozen, the Elezen took off. Before Ryne even had a chance to properly register what had happened, she was standing alone in the middle of the market holding nothing but some sweet food in her hands, no idea how to get back to the Ruby Bazaar, and Alisaie gone. She had no idea where in the city Meteor, Emet-Selch, Hythlodaeus, Lyse or Alphinaud would be, and it would take quite a while before Soroban, whoever that might be, would find out about foreigners searching for a way across the Ruby Sea.

She could of course ask for directions, but that would give away that there were foreigners staying with the Eorzean trading company whose name escaped her right now, which in turn would make anything following a nebulous incident with a Namazu that Meteor mentioned unnecessarily hard to escape. For all intents and purposes, Ryne was lost right now.

If only she had paid more attention to the way than staring and marvelling at everything around the place.

Swiftly devouring her treat, she tried to figure out where Alisaie could have gone for a moment before she remembered that Alisaie was the one Scion other than Thancred who had spent the most time skulking about in the dark watching things or trailing people. Thancred she might have been able to track, given that she knew his methods, but this incarnation of Alisaie was a mystery to her.

Now, there were methods of finding where you were in an unfamiliar place that had been taught to her by several people. The first and easiest thing was to climb the nearest vantage point to get a better picture of one’s surroundings. It was how the guard watch shift at the Crystarium operated as well and therefore something that Ryne quite intimately understood. But looking around, there was no easy way to gain higher ground compared to most other things in the city; normally a roof would have been more than enough but in Kugane everything was built quite differently from how she was used to. Scratching climbing a much taller, obviously more dangerous building off her list, she instead started following the crowd a little. Finding a proper inn of some sort to ask for directions discreetly, maybe—but she was not certain how any one such place operated here. In Eorzea it was quite obvious that many innkeepers would help but also would sell you out to the highest bidder or to the one threatening them. If the same incident as had happened to Meteor would repeat here, then Ryne asking for directions in Kugane might once again give them away if the Garleans threatened the innkeepers just enough.

Therefore, just beside some aetherite and what appeared to be yet another market street in front of her, Ryne had to count her losses. Her way, for one. Her allies.

If she were to go look for someone else she might get completely and irrevocably lost. But this street looked even less familiar to her than the market street before, and it certainly was a lot less glamorous. This one peddled just about the same wares, although it seemed to be lacking a genuine weapon store or curiosities place like the other. She turned to look at the night sky, and this one was a lot less overly flashy. Paper lanterns but much less needless bling and while still a crowd it was less densely packed than the one she had started out on with Alisaie.

Definitely the wrong direction, but having mindlessly followed the crowd while thinking about her options, Ryne had to quietly admit to herself that she had only gotten _more_ lost while trying to think of a way to get _less_ lost.

There were too many people and too many conversations all at once. Travellers— _ijin—_ like her, locals, merchants, and who the hell knew what else. She was absolutely aware that her Echo, useless though it was in the grand event of things compared to Meteor’s and Minfilia’s, helped her in this particular case. Conversations about orders, general daily things, arguments about prices and banally common things, comments on how important and less important events had spread this far. Once more a harsh reminder of just how _many_ people lived on the Source and how absurdly high the number of lives lost was on the First in comparison. Ryne squeezed her eyes shut with a sigh—and promptly bumped into someone else on this side of the road.

“I—Sorry!”

She opened her eyes and bowed quickly.

The one she had bumped into appeared to be someone around her age, and horrifyingly enough for a split moment she thought it was Gaia. The black hair, the dark eyes, the dark clothing—if she narrowed her eyes just enough at this stranger, she could have sworn it was a phantom from her own memories come to haunt her.

But this was not Gaia. Their hair was too short, they were much taller than Gaia had been even with her platform boots, and much less pale than the sheltered Gaia. The aura they had was that of someone who travelled a lot; maybe not an adventurer like Ryne and not a merchant or a tourist but certainly someone who had seen their fair share of the road.

“No need to apologise,” said the stranger and waved a hand dismissively. “You look like you have seen a ghost, fellow ijin.”

Ryne struggled around the seeing a ghost thing, and instead focused on the next best thing she could: “N-Not from Kugane, are you?”

The stranger crossed her arms and let out a hearty chuckle. “Alas, no.” The crowd’s chattering made it hard to hear her as she put a hand on her face and seemed to scrutinise the situation. “Are you lost? You seem sort of dazed.”

Ryne put a hand on the back of her neck and sighed. “It is that obvious?”

For a moment, the other girl thought about this situation. It was bizarre, all things considered, and Ryne thought of a million ways to get out of this as soon as she could.

“Hmm. You cannot have been in Kugane for long if you are _that_ lost. How about it—I help you get back to wherever it is you are staying.”

Having spent enough time with people now, Ryne knew a condition with strings attached when she heard it. Her frown at the very least seemed to be amusing to the stranger she had bumped into.

“Oh, you glower as if you are expecting me to rob you blind. No, I promise there are no strings attached.” She dismissively waved her hand about. “Although—you sound Eorzean. I have never been. Tell me about Eorzea, and that’ll be enough payment.”

Ryne sighed.

A stranger who seemingly belonged to no organisation, offering her a way back with no strings other than tales of Eorzea was… too good to be true.

But this was a situation that Thancred and Meteor both would have called a gift Chocobo you couldn’t afford to check the beak of. She nodded mutely, and the stranger clapped her hands together.

“Fantastic. Well then, Eorzean, where are we off to?”

* * *

The girl—much less a girl and more of a young woman the same age as Ryne was now—introduced herself as Terra. While she had lived in Kugane for quite a while by now, she did absolutely not feel at home here; after all, she had been born and raised in Rabanastre for most of her life. Only recently had her parents died serving on some faraway front that was not quite Eorzea but close to it, and she had packed up what little she had to live with her uncle in Kugane. Several hundred yalms, malms and whatever other measurement she could think of later, most of which had been travelled in the company of resistance groups that were dying out slowly but steadily, and Terra had eventually arrived here.

That was where Ryne had picked up that she knew how to travel, which got an almost delighted laugh out of Terra when she confessed such.

“I thought I had lost that aura by now, but I suppose once you pack up your belongings to leave your erstwhile home behind it sticks to you for the rest of your life.”

“In Eorzea they’d call you an adventurer, and according to any and all adventurers I know that is not something that will ever leave you, sorry to say.”

“Ha! I cannot quite say I mind. I learned a lot on the road and off the road, after all.”

Ryne nodded at that.

As the Scions all agreed, it was best to stick to their little lies about their backstories. Therefore Ryne told the story of a La Noscean farmer girl who had enough of the quaint life and left with another adventurer. She just carefully made certain that she did not give her allegiance with the Scions away; the less the Garleans knew about Scions being in the Far East the better, and Ryne instead told stories about the less exciting parts of being a Warrior of Light. She changed names, changed reasons, but Terra listened with the same intense expression that Gaia had had whenever the story came to tales from the Source.

A story of helping out on a horrendously hot summer day around a farm in Middle La Noscea. Tales of kidnapped people around Thanalan, and tales of people escaping the Bowl of Embers not only with their lives but also their minds intact and the Lord of Inferno Ifrit slain by their hands. The stories of how several people who had never and might never truly meet all worked together to save lives and to return a Sylph elder to their home. Of how the reclusive Ishgard ended their long war and Ryne claimed she visited the city of ice and stone shortly before her travel brought her to the farthest shore she could reach as an Eorzean.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, Terra and Ryne wound up sitting at a table with an assortment of fried things that Ryne had long since lost track of, with her changing up every little story. How she had only heard of the Black Wolf falling in passing because she had been busy trying to take up weaving.

“A catastrophe,” she said with a giggle, “greater than even the Seventh Umbral Calamity.”

In turn, it seemed as if Terra in particular was more skilled in the trades than in combat. A hobbyist in most things, she was quite good with cross-stitching and had a hand for hammering out dents in armour. Something or other about an unwieldy hammer feeling just right in her hands, and how it made for good improvised weapons whenever necessary. She enjoyed polishing gems so they reflected everything, knew how to tell what sorts of leather were cheaply produced and not as viable to make sturdy armour. She complimented the handiwork on Tataru’s gift in colourful words, claiming that this had to be one of the best travelling armour for a light on her feet close combat fighters she had ever seen. Even the weapons Terra marvelled at, claiming that she had not seen a gunblade that wonderfully crafted since she had last beheld one from Bozja as a child shortly before her parents left.

“Despite everything the people say I am more of a geomancer than anything else. Can you believe that?”

“Somehow, I can. And besides, as long as you have a proper catalyst in your weapon somewhere, you could even use a blacksmithing hammer to trace the fates.”

“Coming from an Eorzean adventurer with a gunblade and a knife, somehow, _somehow_ I can believe that.”

When and where the conversation turned from light and joyous to suddenly glum and dark, Ryne had no idea. But she supposed that Terra reminded her of Gaia in countless ways and the guilt of leaving Gaia behind in a timeline that was doomed was catching up to her once more.

Of course, she could not mention it the way it was. But as it turned out, her lie about having to leave someone she loved behind for certain death to make the world a better place was something that Terra understood. Many resistance fighters she had travelled with would soon wind up dead and gone, some even died to get her and the others out of whatever underground tunnels they were in to escape the Empire. Eventually freedom would wait for them on the horizon, and Terra wistfully looked at Kugane Tower not far from where the two of them were seated.

“In a sense, I suppose the reason why I tried everything in this peaceful place was because they could not. They all got me here. You fight for the ones you left behind, and I suppose I… live for them?”

Gaia would have _killed_ Ryne for giving up the fight. But at the same time, now that she thought about it, she also would have killed her if she stopped enjoying being on the Source despite the pressing duty of changing the future.

“… Would you labour as hard as you do, knowing that it is all in vain?”

Terra raised her eyebrows and turned back to look at Ryne, who was now shoving the last piece of fried fruit around in her bowl. Ryne had no idea why she had echoed what Hythlodaeus had so bitterly spat out on the boat before leaving her behind to chew on those words. But somehow it fit into the conversation she had with this perfect stranger who reminded her so much of Gaia by this point that she was half tempted to take a peek at her soul. But perhaps his words sprung to her mind because she had already brought Gaia up to Hythlodaeus in the past, claiming that she wanted to find her Source counterpart and that she would care for her the same way she cared for the Gaia she had to leave behind in the abandoned timeline.

“That is an odd question, Ryne. And not one with an easy answer.”

“….”

Terra picked her chopsticks back up and clicked them together a few times. “Knowing it is in vain makes labouring—or even just living—for something or someone rather hard, don’t you think? But if there is one thing I have learned since I escaped Rabanastre, then it is that not everything is ever in vain. That is why these people helped me, that is why I fought with them for as long as we were going the same direction. And sure, we parted. Often we parted bloodied and beaten and exhausted, knowing that the last battle had been for nothing. That maybe the next fight would be for nothing as well. Yet we continued. I had no idea that my uncle had been desperately trying to find me the entire time. I feared he would simply throw me out for the longest time. I might have travelled in vain. And then, when I arrived, he just threw his arms around me and sobbed out a hundred over a hundred different prayers of gratefulness to the kami.”

She smiled, and Ryne held her breath for a moment. Somehow, watching her once again click her chopsticks together with that smile as the lanterns everywhere lit up the night around them reminded her of the first time she had ever seen the night sky, her heart hammering in her chest and a confident calm she thought was the actual Minfilia telling her that the time had come flowing through her as she watched the stars glitter above.

“If you know your own actions are in vain, then that’s that. But you might still be able to change the ending—and if your own one is inevitable, then perhaps you will inspire someone else along the way. All you can do is continue doing what you are trying to do. Nothing is ever in vain.” With that said, Terra lunged forward and snatched the last piece of fried fruit out of Ryne’s bowl. She couldn’t even protest the action before Terra shoved it into her mouth and chewed with a self-satisfied grin. “Even if it means you mangle a hundred thousand pieces of cloth trying to embroider it—on the one-hundred-thousandth-and-one when you do succeed, you might think it a vain attempt. But your struggles might teach the next one several ways to avoid doing as bad as you did. So yes, I would labour as hard as I do; while in vain for myself it might teach the rest how to not depart on a pointless voyage.”

* * *

The Ruby Bazaar was harder to find than she had expected. How Alisaie had managed to learn the way there by heart was beyond Ryne, but then again she had never truly had to spend that much time inside large cities that made no sense to her. Eulmore she had always spent more time captive in than being allowed to walk free, and the Crystarium’s paths made a shocking amount of sense once she got used to them. Necessity was the mother of invention, and most of the everyday life related things were found closer to the main living quarters. The rest, for the trade, were scattered as close to the markets as they could be.

Kugane did apparently not follow a logic that Ryne could figure out right away, and Terra laughed and pointed out that most of the foreign trade places were near the ijin district.

That… made sense.

Ryne cursed herself for not figuring that out sooner, which earned her a laugh from her guide.

“I for one am glad that you did not quite figure this out by yourself. It made for quite a night.”

“If I have to be honest, I agree. Even if I do feel mighty stupid now.”

Terra laughed, a mischievous glint in her eyes as she winked. “Well, good for you, you’re cute even when stupid. Oh and, the street we met? I’m there nearly every night. If you stay here for a bit longer, Ryne, feel free to come drop by. I can show you more of the city.”

Out of the corner of her eyes she saw that Alisaie was slowly walking down the street and stopped when she saw that Ryne was talking to someone. Instead she nodded and bowed politely to Terra once again.

“I would quite enjoy that, I think. Which means that I will be seeing you soon.”

Terra laughed, a hand on her mouth. “Good. In that case, until later.”

She bowed, too, and Ryne crossed her arms as Terra walked off.

Ryne narrowed her eyes, finally giving in to the debilitating curiosity that had held her in its grip ever since they had departed from the main market street to the Ruby Bazaar. Aethersight, trusty and tested with the fractures that had run through Meteor’s soul, threatening to spill forth primordial light with reckless, destructive abandon. Alisaie’s soul blazed a bright, flickering violet in the distance. The market up ahead was an incomprehensible flare of colours, bright enough that it hurt Ryne’s head if she lingered on it for too long.

Terra’s soul was the gentle sway of darkness, littered with sparkling stars shining on the canvas that was the night sky. It was brighter, more solid, livelier than Gaia’s had been, but the shade was unmistakable. She had memorised it the same way that Gaia claimed she had memorised hers, which many people described as a sail of light that was stitched back together lovingly with thread of purest, gentle sunshine.

That soul that belonged to the Oracle of Darkness on the First belonged to a woman with a desire to start adventuring again on the Source.

* * *

“I think I have an answer,” she said to Hythlodaeus the next morning.

He turned his head slightly to look at her out of the corners of his eyes but did not acknowledge her beyond that.

“I think I would labour as hard as I would, even knowing that it would be in vain for myself.”

Hythlodaeus sighed and shrugged. “May the world ever keep your brilliant selflessness intact, Oracle of Light.”

Ryne peeked up at him and tilted her head. The evening in Idyllshire came back to her as she looked at him. She knew that his tempering made him contradictory right down to the last fibre of his being, but also that there was a way to untemper him eventually. They but needed to push the Scions into the right direction after Gyr Abania and Yanxia were freed from the Empire’s grasp and they all had a reason for it: Minfilia.

But she could not forget that genuine display of Hythlodaeus wishing her well on her quest to find the Source’s shard of Gaia again, and she had a feeling that he had had a feeling that she might find her in the Far East. Foresight was fickle, and truthfully she had never asked how it worked when his gaze was not turned towards the literal end of the world scenario that was brewing up in the distance.

“Maybe my broken promises will mean that someone else gets to keep theirs.”

All she got at first was a long sigh. Then, finally, another shrug. “You Sundered all so selflessly work for a future that you will never see yourselves. It boggles the mind—but it is your genuine strength. Many break knowing that their promises made are not going to be promises kept. But for any one who gives up, another three take up their torch and march on. It is those coming after that those walking before try to lead, and that is why we as the Unsundered cannot quite judge your worth. Viewed from the lens of nigh immortality, your struggles are in vain and endearingly pointless like your lives.”

“You need not answer, but… those who gave up their lives for Zodiark and Hydaelyn both. Did they not do so hoping that the survivors and their children—or us Sundered—would have a chance at doing better than whatever happened before the end of times?”

He froze.

For the first time since he had joined them, Hythlodaeus seemed genuinely shocked as he considered her words.

“Chew on that for a while, Seer. When you have an answer, you know where to find me.”

And with that, she waved him farewell and told the man at the counter that she was going into the city to check it out. Maybe she _could_ find someone who had seen Gosetsu and Yugiri today.


	73. ACT XI: Where Our Hearts Remain, Part 2

It made for a rather bizarre comparison. The Reach needed a healer, and the sole dedicated healer of their little group was none other than a rather unapologetic Bringer of Chaos. The Reach needed someone capable of utter destruction to clear out some of the rubble, and the one giving them the much-needed firepower was a Warrior of Light. Technically Warrior of Light.

Truth be told, he was absolutely no longer sure what to call himself. It was clear that Meteor, the Exarch and Ryne all deserved these nominators; either through dedication to Hydaelyn Herself or her sundered creation. He lacked that same conviction. Yet simultaneously he would never once have willingly laboured towards a genuine Rejoining with his own hands; balance was what he tried to keep and what Elidibus kept until it was time to tip it. He was not a Bringer of Chaos either.

Unukalhai had as much lost himself as he had found himself, and the realisation struck him just as he idly dismissed a Voidsent back to whence it came with a wave of his hand. Any vaguely human-shaped Voidsent had been considered an abomination, had craved flesh and blood to balance its imbalanced aether, and he had merely heard horror stories about the supposed Warriors of Light tearing the people they had sworn to protect apart with their misshapen hands.

Under the scrutinising gaze of the Scion Papalymo Unukalhai had done quite a lot of supposed heavy lifting without as much as overly using his hands. Voidsent were quite useful, and the Court he had taken over was all but grovelling at his feet hungering for a chance to break through the walls that divided the Thirteenth from the Source. Unfortunately for them he did not allow them to run wild once their duty was done, and his control over them clearly intrigued the mage. Little did he know that Unukalhai more and more felt like he was not supposed to be here doing this.

Judging from the overall glum expressions amongst the supposed “Warriors of Light”, he was not the only one to think that way. The Exarch spent an outrageous amount of time once a day, often in strangely late or strangely early parts of the day or night talking to their actual Warrior of Light over a linkshell. He was the one with the highest spirits, trying to pitch in where he could and making certain that he was busy at any given time. Elidibus and Lahabrea meanwhile both individually looked like what members of the Resistance called a soaked griffin. Lahabrea, admittedly, might have been a little bit exhausted—he complained of headaches and strange nausea and refused to offer any sort of explanation as to why he was having these bouts even after the other resident healers checked and said that everything was fine and they had no idea where his migraines could be coming from. Elidibus meanwhile froze every so often and looked around, strange tension rolling over him whenever he was close to certain people—as Unukalhai soon learned, usually around those that had perished in the original timeline; Lahabrea, Minfilia, Wilred, Papalymo.

Between all of that, his strange loss of self as he was reduced to the Warrior of Light capable of controlling Voidsent and nothing else seemed so _insignificant._

“Unukalhai.”

He blinked several times and shook his head. “Yes?”

“I do have been wondering: is that truly the name you were born with?”

What a strange question, especially from so studied a person such as Papalymo. He would have expected to tell the man all he knew of Voidsent and how they behaved, how to scrutinise contracts and how to make certain that there was no loophole for the Voidsent to abuse. Not that taking over a Court like he had done would be possible for any one mage of the Source.

“No, I was not,” he answered truthfully and shrugged. “And before you ask the next logical question, I know not what my birth name was.”

Truth be told, he did not even know if he had ever been wanted in the first place. The coming end of the world made people hasty, desperate to live their lives as they had wanted to. Many orphans of the Thirteenth had already been naught more than hasty decisions met with swift ends, and as the number of people dwindled more and more the orphans were all that was left eventually. And he had been just unfortunate enough to be young when he paused and looked around in alarm as a voice implored, begged him to _Hear, Feel, Think._

“What prompted you to change your name to Unukalhai, then?”

“I never asked for it to be changed. It is custom that those who awaken to the Echo on the Thirteenth are given new names. For Warriors of Light were considered like the stars in the skies—and thus were we named after them. If there was more reasoning behind ‘Unukalhai’, it is lost to me.”

So many people.

So many names.

All discarded in a neat pile, a book that was surely lost to eternal darkness by now. If anyone had even thought to note his given name in there alongside his new name like the legendary Warriors of Light from before. Like the Warriors of Light that turned into monsters that devoured the people. A weak, flickering star lost on the endlessly bleak and black canvas that was the Thirteenth.

“Interesting. Pouring over history books and older theories in the past has left me wondering why nothing of the sort happened on the Source. But with the Sundering taken into account it does make sense that a reflection of the Source would have this particular instance of history. It is quite fascinating.”

Unukalhai shrugged. “It loses its supposed glamour quite a lot when you think about it more, however. I consider myself quite blessed that I do not remember my name—imagine if Lyse had forgotten who she was and truly believed she was Yda. She could never forget being Lyse, but if I were her then I would not remember having ever been anyone but Yda. I would be incapable of missing being Lyse like she did.”

Apparently he had struck some sort of nerve, seeing as Papalymo’s expression went unexpectedly dark. The scholar remained quiet as Unukalhai bowed and said that he was going to check if someone else needed a hand with getting rid of something and marched off, all while the Lalafell stared after him with what might have been a confused glare.

* * *

A side effect of becoming a Governor who regularly interacted with the void he noticed was a strange sensibility to light. That, and the ability to see in the dark.

It made sleeping harder than expected, and made walking around in broad daylight a chore.

Hugging his knees to himself in a perfectly dark place with a bed while all around him the others in the room slept was a strange experience to have. He himself had always thought that on some level he craved human contact after so long as an entity that existed beyond the boundaries of life and death, but now that he was in a room with living, breathing people again all he got from it was irritation. Therefore, Unukalhai eventually quietly hopped off his bed and left the room to walk out.

Rhalgr’s Reach at night was a completely different beast from what it was like at daytime. During the hours of the day the place seemed to radiate life despite its still half destroyed state. Many people who had never dealt with the Fist of Rhalgr before joining the Resistance said they understood why the Temple of the Fist had been built in this place; not only was it safe but also it was perfect to both invigorate spirits and leave enough time to meditate.

At night, the warmth was sapped from it entirely. The water went from a source of life in some ways to what looked like an endlessly deep inky black pool, and even the statue of Rhalgr changed from a benevolent deity to a dreary reminder that his epithet was still and would always be ‘the Destroyer’. What the sun made seem like a welcoming place turned into an unwelcoming, cold husk at night. But Unukalhai was not out here to marvel at the bizarre beauty of how this place completely changed atmospheres at night.

He gave a greeting to the guard he passed and said that he was simply going for a walk. The guards were all placed in ways that they could see most of the entryways to the Reach easily, with one near the sleeping quarters to wake everyone up in an emergency. Which meant that the place that Unukalhai had in mind was empty.

Perhaps it was unwise for someone who never learned how to swim to sit at the edge of the walkways across the water leading to the foot of the statue. But Unukalhai sat there anyway, once more with his legs hugged to himself and his eyes turned heavenward. The stars always stayed the same between the Shards, Elidibus claimed. All Unukalhai remembered as he lay in the middle of nowhere once the taunting cackling of the Court and its Governor had faded were skies so shockingly dark that Elidibus seemed like a sun when he walked into his fading vision.

The Source was peaceful—its people were not, but the night revealed that the Source itself enjoyed peace that other shards could barely even dream of at times.

The stars were but a dreary, unfriendly reminder that the skies in other places were much less peaceful.

“I never took _you_ of all people for a stargazer.”

He startled, not enough to fall into the water but enough to get dangerously close to it.

What a sight to behold—the stars ever loomed over them, unfriendly reminders that those they had been named after blinked out in the place they had been born. But his fellow Warrior of Light born and raised on the Thirteenth, whom he had thought lost the moment she departed at the shores of Kholusia, sat down next to him with a sigh.

“Unukalhai.”

“Celaeno…?”

Rather than say anything else, she simply put a hand on his head. For a moment he stared at her quietly until she shrugged vaguely. “You brave, bleeding-heart fool,” she said and ruffled his hair. “Here I thought nothing could surprise me any more, and you still manage to stir some shock and pride into what I thought a still heart. How should I address you, O Governor?”

He turned to look at her.

It was hard to track how much time had passed on the First in comparison to the Source. However many years had ticked by for her, it might have been a fraction for him. Or perhaps it had been mere hours for her compared to half an eternity that it had been for him here. He could not tell, and time passed them by without signs of it ever passing. Yet something about her expression was hardened—not bitter, raw as it had been on the First. No, she seemed seasoned by the heartbreak of having been a villain by the story she so longed to be a hero of.

Unukalhai closed his eyes with a sigh. “Saltmoors. No Governor. Please. Just talk to me as a fellow Warrior of Light from the Thirteenth’s final days. How come you are on the Source?”

She shrugged. “Hitched a ride with the Ascians trying to make a status report to their superiors. I don’t think they were all too pleased about my sudden reappearance, but they did not deny my request of being brought here.”

He nodded and she removed her hand from his head. “I heard that they were working to see the First brought back to balance. How much… time has passed for you since the day at the coast?”

Celaeno swung her legs over the side of the walkway and dangled them just above the surface of the water. It was still, it was unfathomable deep—a vortex of sheer darkness, just like the flood that had devoured Frontier in the end. But this still water reflected the stars above like it was supposed to. Countless, myriad stars twinkling across the night sky, all unreachable but ever present as they were supposed to.

“Nearly a century.”

He turned his head to look at her, an important question bubbling up in the back of his mind. If the timeline remained intact… then… surely there was another Crystal Exarch waiting to prevent an Eighth Calamity on the First?

“Surprisingly enough, it were the Ascians who stopped the Flood of Light. It simply… stopped. Froze. Turned to crystal brimming with primordial light—and then they started working. Sought out what remained in the empty void of light beyond that artificial wall, directed the people around.”

A tale of villains and survivors standing before the mess the villains had made now that the supposed heroes were gone. The world on the brink, and none too eager to step forward to save the world. Rather than seek Warriors of Light or Warriors of Darkness to solve the problems, Altima very rapidly went from a stranger in a dark cloak to a person known around the First. She posed as researcher seeking ways to reverse-engineer the Flood of Light; rather than stilling the world she claimed that there had to be a way to quicken aether. When surviving aetherologists agreed to working with her and figuring out that a comically large amount of activity would be necessary, Pashtarot was the one to seek the sect of Elven mages that one of the Warriors of Light had been from.

They all but set out shreds of possibility in front of the survivors; one travelled to the ruins of Voeburt with Voeburtite survivors to entreaty the Fae folk under their King Titania. In the evens of that they came across a mostly mutated, partially mindless creature that had the same name as a lost princess of Voeburt, and soon lured out the former court mage Beq Lugg. A bizarre chain of events tying together plots and revelations that Ardbert and his friends had come across eventually led them all to the supposed Shadowkeeper—Celaeno, or whatever her name on the First had been.

“Beyond the known world lies the Void, I told them. A world of monsters as horrifying as those that Deudalaphon and Fandaniel were keeping at bay beyond the frozen Flood of Light. A world that roiled like a restless ocean with nothing to ever calm the ceaseless tides. A world that the mages had tried to tap into for power beyond their reckoning. Power that they needed.

Power that Celaeno could not grant, and neither were the Ascians too keen on dealing with the Void.

“The status report included a question. A rather simple question, in fact. Could someone become a Governor without being a Voidsent?”

Unukalhai froze for a moment and then curled back up. Rested his head on his knees and swayed from side to side for a few heartbeats. “You have your answer, then.”

“You are quite a daredevil deep down, are you not, Unukalhai? The general consensus among the Ascians was that it should not be possible. Pray, how did you manage this?”

“I baited the previous Governor with the chance to slaughter the last speck of light left to the Void. Made a contract that had no way to be breached with betrayal. Either he kills me or I kill him, and going by the rules of the Court in the latter event I become the next Governor. Not once did any Voidsent think it possible that the boy they slaughtered once already would emerge victorious.”

Celaeno nodded, her expression rather grave. For what felt like both a split second and an eternity, both of them simply looked up at the sky. The Reach was quiet. Only the occasional sound of a fish of some sort breaching the surface of the water and very, very distantly the crackle of fire, and Unukalhai silently traced star signs he knew. Somewhere amongst those clusters and names lay the star that had his name on the Thirteenth, and elsewhere the star that had given Celaeno her name when the Echo made itself known to her also glimmered in the sky. Stargazing was not something that either of them enjoyed.

At the same time, he had to admit that simply sitting here quietly with his fellow Warrior of Light from the Thirteenth and watching the stars above was comforting in a strange way. They had spent so very long trying to find ways to save their world, often questioning whether they were doing it out of their own free will or through manipulation by the Ascians and Hydaelyn both. Having spent enough time with someone genuinely manipulated by both Zodiark and Hydaelyn at the same time, Unukalhai could finally admit that what he mostly sought was petty revenge.

Petty revenge for a child who didn’t even remember his own name. Who grew up in and died in utter darkness.

But Igeyorhm was down for the count. The Elidibus who had saved his life was also down for the count. Technically other people had done what he yearned for, and now he had no way of joining the restoration that Celaeno always yearned for.

Which she apparently knew, judging from her suddenly moving closer to him and throwing an arm around his shoulders to pull him in.

For a moment he simply froze in her sudden embrace.

“I’m the Shadowkeeper. You’re a Governor. Neither of us are mortal. But we’re still human, aren’t we?” she whispered, her voice thick with an emotion he couldn’t quite place. “We lost our homes, we lost our bodies, we lost ourselves. Hells, I think too much about this and I start slipping further and further into the abyss that we refused to die in. But Ardbert’s… unnecessary kindness, that unnecessary show of love for even an enemy on a battlefield, it always pulls me out of that abyss. I cannot leave this unfinished—for their sake.”

He unfroze finally, leaning closer to her and exhaling a shaky breath. “One life for one world seems like a fair exchange to you, but… do not let that abyss take you when you think your duty done. The Thirteenth will need you. Will need us. And afterwards we… we are not mortal. But we are human.”

A soft laugh. “Are you saying that human existence is miserable without another to share the torment with?”

“More or less,” Unukalhai whispered. “But you are the only person amongst all worlds who feels the same nostalgia and resentment for the stars above as I do. So perhaps not the torment to share, no, but to be on equal ground.”

Much to his surprise, all she did was sigh instead. Shadowkeeper Cylva, Warrior of Light Celaeno, seemed to be thinking her next words through carefully, and the sudden tension was thick in the air as he realised that the water only looked this dark to him because he could see his surroundings just fine. Whatever vision he had in the dark, it did not seem to apply to water. Bizarre.

And then, finally, she shook her head.

“I do not think we are any longer, Unukalhai. You still bear, yes, deserve that name taken from a star. You are by all means the Warrior of Light that the Mothercrystal needed all of us with the Echo to be in the death throes of the Thirteenth. Perhaps not for the Thirteenth itself, but for the Source instead. I am… not. I ever worked in the shadow of Warriors of Light despite seemingly having been destined to be one. And… the more time I spent thinking about it, the more I came to terms with it. I do not mind it. We are equal, but not the same. You are… Unukalhai, bearer of a name of the stars, Warrior of Light and Governor of the Court of Saltmoors. I am… simply Cylva, the Shadowkeeper.”

He exhaled slowly and closed his eyes. Perhaps half burying his face in her embrace was childish, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do at this point. “Celaeno died when the Thirteenth fell and died again when the Warriors of Light from the First let Cylva live, did she not? Cylva is all you ever were. All you will ever be. Celaeno of Frontier is gone and but the Shadowkeeper remains.”

She laughed, a surprisingly comforting rumble going through her entire body as she did so. “Unukalhai,” she said eventually, “at duty’s end we will meet again. Perhaps not to return to our lost home but to look at its newfound life fondly and then to return to the Source and the First respectively. But for now, our duties keep us bound. You here on the Source, and I with the Ascended on the First.”

Unukalhai nodded. “Would you… still mind… staying with me? For a while longer, at least, ere we part again?”

Celaeno—Cylva—said nothing and the two of them simply stayed where they were.

Under the stars they had been named after, on a star that was not theirs but that had become his.

* * *

It was as if the gloom dispersed not only around the Reach but also the gloom that followed him. Morale was low, yes, but they were merely beaten—not broken yet. As long as they were simply played with, they would simply get back up to continue their fight.

Likewise, the gloom around Elidibus had tightened, shrunk down, had been reduced to something that Unukalhai could not quite place. He was no less attentive but the moment he thought no one was watching him he looked unwell. The bizarre opposite to that was the fact that going from moody and often snappy, Lahabrea somehow seemed to _flourish_ under these new circumstances. He had half a mind to start speculating what any of this was all about, but Unukalhai chose not to start thinking about it too much. Whatever it was, it likely was none of his business anyway.

“Strange, is it not?”

He turned his head to the side and saw that the Exarch had approached him.

Quite impressive, considering that this place was quite hard to reach by normal means. Unukalhai had had a hand in getting up here thanks to a Voidsent, but considering that the Exarch was breathing slightly louder than usual told him that the Miqo’te had climbed up here. He but wordlessly moved to the side somewhat so that the Exarch had enough space to sit next to him.

“Thank you. But as I was saying, the history books did try their best to stay true to what had truly transpired here. Yet at the same time they so very spectacularly failed to capture the energy here in Gyr Abania.”

Unukalhai nodded. “A storm is brewing on the horizon. But the storm might as well be them getting ready to fight once more despite this… cruel loss.” He turned his head to the side to look at the Exarch. With the departure of the Warrior of Light and their party he had half expected the Miqo’te to also turn as gloomy as Elidibus was, but not a single thing had changed about him. “Say, uhm… Exarch.”

“G’raha Tia is fine.”

“G’raha Tia, then. You have read the history books on this liberation war and just said that it felt as if they failed to capture the energy behind it. Are you… scared? Scared of the coming history yet unwritten?”

Of all the time travellers, there was quite a lot of mystery surrounding the Exarch still. Elidibus had mostly come forward with what his deal was. Ryne was open-minded and quite enjoyed talking about her timeline, even if it brought a lot of painful nostalgia to her. But the Exarch and the Warrior of Light guarded their secrets well—yet somehow despite that, it seemed that they accepted each other having their little secrets and thought no ill of them. Were Unukalhai in the Warrior of Light’s position he would feel naught but fury for the Miqo’te next to him, but he knew by now that Meteor in particular had dealt with that fury as they marched to the depths of the ocean with their own impending death clinging to their skin, crawling through their blood and gnawing away at their bones.

“That is a question many a person would ask. But I suppose being a historian I learned that no matter what, history will be made by certain people and will be written by others. I had hopes of being the one to write history, not make it. But with as much awe as I looked to the past, the future always terrified me as I grew up. As long as I was the one recording it, I reckoned it would be fine. Then, suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch in my head, I wanted to be the one making history. I wanted to be remembered. I wanted to make a change.” An amused chuckle escaped him as he thwapped his tail on the stone pillar they were sitting on. “I would go remembered. But the change I caused was not one on a grand scale. I simply helped deepen the fear of loss within the Warrior of Light. Going by the original timeline that remained mostly the same between my own, theirs, and yours—Moenbryda’s death and my disappearance were not too far apart. And not long thereafter they would lose all of the Scions sans Alphinaud and Tataru as well as the Sultana and Raubahn, two of their closer allies. It took me years to realise that this small change affected Eorzea on the greater scale… until the very moment they died somewhere in Garlemald.”

The Exarch stretched and turned his head to look at Unukalhai.

His red eyes were surprisingly soft and warm, and his smile was genuine as well. It was a learned expression, he realised, one that only someone who had kept their face mostly hidden for so long could wear. The same reason why Unukalhai noticed his expressions were stiff and unfriendly—he had gone so long with no one seeing his face that he had forgotten what it was like to be perceived properly.

“I presume that is why this energy feels so strange to me now. I underestimated the smaller scale effects usually played an important role in the big events. You make or break a war by small morale shifts. And that is something our opponent understands but never quite works upon until much later. To destroy the world in one glorious last battle, one must needs understand how to upset the balance irrevocably.” A shrug. “It is quite a while until the bells of the end will toll for us the same way they tolled for… the timeline we escaped from. This coming storm is one of blood and not one of all existence. We had best be prepared for it—so that the history books note it down as grand victory rather than a grand loss.”

Out of the corners of his eyes he caught a flash of fire. Both Unukalhai and the Exarch turned to look at this elaborate nonsense Lahabrea was weaving into the air—from where they were perched it looked like he was weaving a net out of fire. Several Resistance mages were clustered around him and seemingly were taking notes.

Once more Unukalhai realised how bizarre this situation was. Here were the enemies of the Source and all existence walking amongst its people like they were proper allies now, and no decision as to whether they would be forgiven or not had been made yet. Somehow, he had a feeling that there was no forgiveness—Unukalhai was not one to grant it, and despite all he was not going to forgive any one Ascian for what they had done.

Celaeno—Cylva had, in parts at least. She had departed with the Ascended when the sun had started to rise, no open hostility from either side as they left.

Apparently he had tensed, because the Exarch put one of his hands on Unukalhai’s shoulder.

“Worry not. History will remember them as villains first and foremost. What they do after our duty is done will decide whether they will ever get a chance to be forgiven or whether we will once again take up arms against them. History is fickle—but we are undying enough to help preserve it in all the right ways. So is the Antecedent.”

He nodded and watched as the Resistance mages tried to copy the elaborate spell that Lahabrea had woven into the air before them. Some had more success than others, but none of them seemed inclined to give up any time soon. Shockingly enough, while Lahabrea stood there with his arms crossed and likely his usual scowl on his face, it seemed as if he was giving constructive criticism on some people’s approach to the spell. After having spent so long seeing this particular Unsundered sow nothing but destruction and chaos, it was positively shocking to see him like that.

The Exarch, too, swished his tail across the stone.

Perhaps staying here to make certain that history was recorded correctly was something that he could see himself doing—Cylva had been right, after all. Even were the Thirteenth to be fully restored right in this moment, Unukalhai would choose to return to the Source. For his own home had never been Frontier. It had never been the Rift. The Source had become a home to him when all he had ever known beforehand was the emptiness of darkness.


	74. ACT XI: Where Our Hearts Remain, Part 3

For the longest time he had considered the Far East completely under control. Easily under control, in fact. There were the occasional sparks of rebellion that turned into a blaze the moment he allegedly passed away, but seeing that the spark was kept alive in some places was bizarre after having heard how thoroughly broken the spirits of the people there were.

He sloshed through the wet sand with a scowl on his face, all while the Warrior of Light followed him with a light hum on their lips—an ironic echo of Alexis doing the same whenever they went to the coast. Unlike Alexis, however, the Warrior of Light was strongly armed and despite the jovial whistling they eventually started they were very clearly keeping their eyes just about everywhere around them. Gyuki moved in the shade near the rocks at the coast, but none of them seemed to mind these two humans trespassing as long as they did not attack.

Frankly, it was a ridiculous notion that these pirates could drive off the empire.

Yet seeing as the empire wasa making pacts with the Kojin of the Red, it very much stood to reason that the Kojin of the Blue had a solution to their issues in regards to their brethren. Meteor had quickly claimed that they had received a different blessing of the Kami to ensure that the Kojin did not waste their time on them. Then they lamented the fact that the Exarch was missing this spectacle on account of being in Gyr Abania. And then they said that they were going to see if there was not some sort of errand they could run while the Oracle of Light and the Seer took off with the Scion and the Rebel to find that which the Kojin requested of them.

“Hey, Emet-Selch.”

He shrugged to signal that he was listening to them.

“The topic came up before, but most of the Primals have grounds in ancient beliefs, yes? Can the same be said for the Kami? Or even just the Lord of the Revel?”

He sighed. “Kami as a concept are entirely of Sundered make. The Lord of the Revel, however, is one of the Seaspoken who allied with the Atlanteans to build their shared undersea capital.”

Mitron had been a veritable font of knowledge on the Atlantean front. Their stories went that revelry was one of the key components of Atlantis and that those who could breathe under water, those who needed to surface, those that did not need to surface and those who sought to live beneath the waves despite their inability to breathe in the depths all shared one festival. A week surrounding the lunar new year, and the depths rose in celebration. The very Seaspoken who also first suggested this as a joined celebration was the very Lord of the Revel—a title bestowed upon the Seaspoken Susano, whose race had not made it through Termination. Extinct in the blink of an eye, and only in stories did the Lord of the Revel and his people survive.

Emet-Selch fought the urge to gnaw on one of his hands in frustration.

Despite having kept meticulous track of the so-called beast tribes, Lahabrea had not once made mention of the Lord of the Revel surviving in Kojin legend somehow. Igeyorhm’s equally detailed reports mentioned naught of the sort. Nabriales, Mitron, Loghrif, Deudalaphon—not one of the red-masked and certainly none of the black-masked mentioned anything of the sort.

The Warrior of Light behind him drew their bow, nocked an arrow. They had gone back to whistling a tacky little tune and yet somehow despite this managed to hit the Gyuki hissing in the dark that had already been injured by Kojin hunters as if it had a large target on its body.

* * *

One thing he had to hand the Scions’ little harpy of an accountant, she knew her Scions better than anyone else in the realm. And that, fortunately and unfortunately both, also included their temporary allies amongst the Ascians. Sorcerers tended to use heavy, unwieldy staves to channel outrageous amounts of energy whenever they got serious. Normally no weapon worked just as fine to draw small amounts of energy; of course that small amount of energy from then was an unbelievably large amount now. For all intents and purposes the staff with a bladed end was not good for proper sorcery due to its lack of resistance, but it certainly worked more than fine for someone yet pretending to be mortal.

The Oracle of Light had had a point—the less their enemies knew about their true powers, the better their chance of success would be at the end. A mortal mage could do quite a lot with a bladed staff; using one as a club was frowned upon but an adventurer needed to be prepared for just about anything.

The weapon was light, sturdy, and frankly just gaudy enough to be offensive to mages proud of their craft—yet there was no denying that she had made certain that this weapon could channel enough aether to support most of what a normal talented mage could manage. He did not doubt for a moment that the entire thing would shatter like glass if he ever brought all to bear but for mortal standards this staff was expertly made.

Yanxia as a whole was not home to many mages. Many an art incorporated some sort of thaumaturgy or conjury by Eorzean standards, but there were enough intricacies that made it different. Not to mention the art of Doman shinobi such as Yugiri. It was easy enough to spot former conscripts who had somehow escaped underground by the fact that they clearly used spells that had been developed around Eorzea. And of course the fact that Eorzean magic was so easy to spot it was the reason why the Doman Resistance requested him to cease casting spells in plain sight for the time being. Fair enough, Emet-Selch said and went about his usual duties with but the bladed end of his staff as a weapon. Truly, he would have to thank Tataru once they inevitably returned to Kugane.

Somehow, he found himself slogging through Yanxia alongside Yugiri while his fellows all remained in and around Namai.

Strangely enough, as Lyse and Alisaie both had agreed, they had left some pivotal pieces of information out of their explanation as to who exactly the Warriors of Light were. To be more precise, as far as Gosetsu and Yugiri were concerned now, Emet-Selch was simply another Ascian and not the late Emperor Solus of Garlemald.

“Coming back to your identity,” Yugiri in the lead said without turning around, “would that not mean that you have slain one of your fellows in an attempt to retrieve the Antecedent all this time ago? At the Rising Stones?”

It took him a moment to remember what incident in particular she was talking about. Nabriales’ end was not something he had spent too much time mulling over, especially since he had made any attempts to spare him impossible enough that Lahabrea had elected to choose obliteration without as much as a single shred of remorse. “… Yes, that we indeed have.”

“I see. But does that not mean that the Mistress Moenbryda’s sacrifice was all for naught in the end? After all, she said that the healers would be better off saving a hero in peril, and now the hero in peril has been revealed as undying being.” She still had not turned around to even look at him, clearly on the lookout for imperials while she unknowingly talked to one.

“You ask some interesting questions, Lady Yugiri.” At her signal, he ducked behind a rock and they waited for a group of Garlean conscripts to pass. “Speaker Lahabrea would not have died, not in the traditional sense—but there is no denying that his exhaustion was reaching a limit where he would not have survived until now had he continued apace. Her sacrifice was both pointless and an act that saved a life; in the end, whether or not her choice was for naught is up to you. All I can say is that she made her choice knowing what she knew, and within that given frame it was a boundlessly selfless thing to do. Not many people would make such a choice when their own life is concerned.”

Yugiri nodded with her usual reserved expression—but to his aethersight it was clear that something troubled her. She had been in turmoil even before they had arrived if Hythlodaeus’ throwaway remark was to be believed. Any misgivings he had with his fellow Unsundered notwithstanding, not even Emet-Selch was one to doubt the Seer’s unrivalled aethersight.

“I am afraid I cannot quite wrap my head around your story. This… tale of a city and a… Sundering, you call it? But when Doma is free, Architect… Emet-Selch, was it? When Doma is free and Ala Mhigo is too, would you perhaps entertain the thought of explaining it to me? You have spent so much time listening to our, to Doma’s story—I wish to repay you in kind, with an open ear.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. Her expression did not betray the turmoil her aether was in at all even at this point, yet through all of this he noted that her intent was genuine. She did mean what she had just said, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, prowling through the Yanxian landscape in search of a way into the land-side part of Castrum Fluminis.

He cracked a small smile. “You speak to an enemy of your kind, Lady Yugiri. I may well misuse your open ear to cause harm to those you love—after all, there is no telling when our alliance with the Scions is over and done with. It may very well fall apart long before Doma and Ala Mhigo are free once more.”

“And in the event it is not, your alliance with my allies makes you an ally of mine—it would be best to honour this alliance. Even so, your enemies must not stay such forever. Ladies Alisaie and Lyse made it quite clear that whether or not we treat you as villains or allies is all up to us. I would extend my hand in friendship to you and yours, Emet-Selch; not because I fear you or because I forgive you but rather because understanding is as much knowledge weaponised to defend against you in the future as it is simply a means to satisfy curiosity. It is not very often one gets to speak to a self-proclaimed enemy of mankind on equal grounds.”

Emet-Selch snorted. “A far cry from the woman poised to kill Scaeva should he make the wrong move.”

He received a soft laugh in return as Yugiri effortlessly hopped onto the boulder they had been hiding behind. “You never know,” she said surprisingly calmly. “For the time being I will trust you to not stab me in the back, Architect. Know that I have no qualms about slicing your body into fine ribbons should you desire to double-cross me. And your ally will surely pay the price for it as well—if not by my hands, then surely by Lady Alisaie’s.”

“Kill him if you must—you would be doing me a favour.”

“Mhm,” was all she hummed in reply before saying that the road was clear.

* * *

Contrarian.

It was a word most of Amaurot used for the Seer. He seemed to all too cheerfully talk about dire situations and had naught but discontentment for the good ones. A guitar with snapped strings somehow managing to lead the tune effortlessly, a house on fire that protected the neighbourhood, someone who found boundless joy in death and endless sorrow in life. It was ingrained in his very nature, right down to the—according to him—hysterical situation of how his name worked in tandem with his father’s. A child of mages with no magical inclination. A creator of seldom seen imagination with the gift of foresight who hated nothing more than the future.

Truth be told, personal grievances aside, being so close to him without that former closeness present pulled at his heartstrings in ways Emet-Selch had long since thought applied to all of Amaurot. But no, somehow this… hurt worse than the agonising loss of hearth and home.

He knew that ever since he had said that Yugiri could kill the Seer for all he cared she had spent quite a lot of her time watching the dynamic between the four Warriors of Light in the Far East closely. Not-Alexis and the Oracle were clearly close, a relationship akin to mentor and student. Supportive, reciprocated, and explosive as much as it was soothing for both sides. Apprehension was what they forwarded to the Ascians in their team, though it was clear that if worst came to worst the Warrior of Light in particular would still fight to the bitter end for and with them. The Oracle on the other hand had clearly tried time and time again to reach out to her fellow Ascians and had received naught but her hand slapped away. She still continued trying to get them to accept her desire to help—and where she met a disinterested glacial wall for the most part it also was clear that she was chipping away at the ice that surrounded the Seer.

Judging from the way Yugiri frowned at the two Unsundered, however, it was clear that she was not entirely able to make head or tails of what was going on between him and Hythlodaeus. It seemed… contrarian. Most of Amaurot had ever called Hythlodaeus contrarian, but Emet-Selch had once known that it was mostly an act. A rebellion of someone who often knew the futility of such thanks to his foresight. Unbeknownst to most of the city and Yugiri now, Hythlodaeus’ nature had always been contradictory but not to the extent it was now. He made his emotions towards certain things plainly known.

He hated burdening people with unnecessary expectations. His favourite time of the day was midnight, perhaps in parts due to his Lunarian heritage. He despised sacrifice of any sort, from forgoing lunch for work to what eventually had driven him from the Convocation. He enjoyed debating someone into the ground, would have quite enjoyed becoming a travelling Gerun eventually, and of course only talked about any of these things whenever he considered someone close enough to keep them secret.

Once upon a time, Emet-Selch had been able to read him like an open book. Near the first reports of something horrendous happening on the Phantasm continent, right before it all turned upside down.

He could no longer read him, not with the contrarian nature Amaurot had claimed he had having long since become all that remained of Hythlodaeus. The Sundering had taken their home from them, but Zodiark and Hydaelyn had also all but torn the Seer apart.

One day he was nice and friendly. The next day he hissed at everyone attempting to speak to him. Was this what his actions had looked like to those not in on his ruse?

“You do not quite like being shut out,” was all Yugiri said after a while, and he so very desperately wished that she were wrong. “But at this rate all you will find when you finally find common grounds to speak on is shattered glass and shattered bone where once you hoarded treasure.”

With that cryptic statement she stalked off, her mind clearly on something else.

Emet-Selch meanwhile simply turned to watch the unfolding spectacle of the little Oracle of Light managing to make Hythlodaeus join her in giving the would-be liberators a little training session on what the conscripts from the west used.

* * *

“Oh, trust me on this—you will get roped into an assassination attempt one day for all you know, and it will be the most miserable experience you will have because you will have to rely on your own skill rather than your sheer power,” Alexis had said with a cackle not long before the Sundering. After Hydaelyn had risen, after their city had become the battleground for two beings of a magnitude so much higher than anything that had existed before Termination. He had suspected they had simply used their rather large collection of fiction as the grounds for their sudden, inexplicable statement, but part of him wondered if they had tried to put a curse on him in that particular interaction. Dark arts corroded the mind, after all, and someone believing in fate as strongly as Alexis had had, surely they could no longer differentiate between another book they had shoved at Hythlodaeus and Emet-Selch during lunch breaks for all three of them and the dire reality they all had lived in right up until the Sundering. A curse of an inescapable fate would certainly more be something that a Child of Sirius would try to place on an Amaurotine rather than one Amaurotine to the other, but he had not exactly spent a lot of time thinking about it.

Until now.

Knowing that she would be running to her untimely demise if he did not follow her, Emet-Selch had somehow become the Lady Yugiri’s sole assistant for her assassination attempt.

She loved the people of Yanxia. She loved the people of Doma. She also loved her young master, her allies, and therefore was scared of her beloved home not being worthy of her beloved master’s sacrifice should it demand such. As it was right now, with the people scared into obeisance without question, there was not a doubt that Doma would sooner see their sole surviving royal handed over for execution to avoid Yotsuyu’s wrath than continue carrying the spark of rebellion that had now ignited the Ruby Sea. The Witch of Doma would sooner burn all down than yield, and the people would sooner be burned than stand against that hateful blaze.

He did have to wonder what exactly had driven Varis to call van Hydrus to the capital and then send him off to Eorzea with Doma in his son’s hands and then in the hands of this revenge-addled acting viceroy. Granted, he never quite made an effort to understand Varis in the first place, which allegedly led to quite a situation in the future that the Crystal Exarch hailed from. Something or other about unearthing van Baelsar’s Black Rose, very likely Elidibus as the named successor to the Garlean throne, and the emperor dead before the weapon was unleashed to usher in a Rejoining.

Much as Alexis, insane glint in their eyes and a wretched exhausted laugh on their lips as they stalked off into the distance, never to be seen again until this Warrior of Light just happened to be part of their sundered soul, had said, he very much found himself in an assassination attempt and frankly, it was one of the more miserable experiences of his life. Admiration for Yugiri’s insane desire to show Doma that the fight was worth it, that it could be won if she just managed to put a dent in the oh-so-undefeatable Garlean Empire soon faded into exasperation.

He was still playing mortal, after all. A mortal who, just as Lady Yugiri desired freedom, was likely driven by something much more _base_ than lofty goals.

Plain revenge.

Faced with this particular member of the Galvus family, Emet-Selch very rapidly went through several stages of realisation.

One, part of him itched to dig his claws into this wretched man his old vessel had been related to.

Two, in accordance with the pact that they would not be giving their true nature away to their enemies, he would have to simply play the half-Garlean mage with a gun and the desire to avenge his fallen comrade.

Three, part of him was angrier than he initially assumed. After all, this Garlean in particular would be the man to usher in the end of existence as it was… by slaughtering someone in another timeline who still strictly adhered to his personal refusal to interfere. In other words, the Hythlodaeus dead by another timeline’s Zenos yae Galvus’ hands was an innocent bystander of Amaurotine origin. A person that Emet-Selch as the Architect had sworn to protect when he had accepted his title.

Yugiri went down with little effort, and he jumped between the Garlean and her. For a moment, silence.

“Ah, one of the savages’ so highly regarded Warriors of Light… pray, do not disappoint me as much as your kind already has.”

Of course, he had told the Raen that he would have to play mortal. If any one present person escaped their assassination attempt then the trump card the Warriors of Light needed to complete their mission was ruined—Yugiri had been surprisingly understanding, once more citing that as a daughter of the deep and a walker of the shade she understood the necessity that was good cover. If nothing else she made true on her words that she was going to repay the kindness and understanding that the Scions had shown her in kind—much as the time travellers were interesting in ways that other mortals were not, Yugiri showed that perhaps the mutual understanding that had always been the goal for Amaurotines persisted.

The stage was set not for Emet-Selch of Amaurot but for the adventurer they only called Architect. A half-Garlean mage who had but recently lost his fellow adventurer Emissary to this man’s blade. Therefore Emet-Selch only had one possible reply to a drawn blade—a drawn staff, a scowl on his face, and a healthy disregard for his own survival in the name of bloody revenge.

“We were unprepared back at the Reach,” he said calmly, hopefully with his voice just ever so slightly off enough to hint at underlying fury, “but this ends now. An eye for an eye, yae Galvus—your life for Emissary’s.”

No grand speech on liberty, on the hidden will of the oppressed. Short and sweet and wholly predictable.

He could already tell that he was boring Zenos to death before their fight began in earnest with the Witch of Doma shrieking in the background. She gave orders to conscripts and they came running like diligent dogs—and Emet-Selch effortlessly swatted them away with what a normal mage using a staff as a proper catalyst for their spells should be capable of. A shower of ice for the rabble, and a blast of fire for the main attraction of this fight. A scathing shot of aether whenever he had to move.

Bored to death before the battle even began, and Zenos was clearly playing with his food. For all the faults he could firmly place in Varis’ hands, his grandson had attempted to give his son everything he wanted. Spoiled thrill-seeking brat was the words on his lips as he stumbled backwards from what appeared to be an aetherial clone of some sorts.

He had not exactly _watched_ Solus’ great-grandson in combat before. By the time the brat was old enough to enter combat Solus zos Galvus had long since been too old to realistically still care about any of that. Rumours and whispered half-truths had reached him still, and a particularly furious Nabriales had complained at length about something or other that Zenos had ruined at one point but truth be told he had never quite cared.

Part of him wished he had now as he wove between sword slashes and realised that instinctually he had started drawing on the Underworld to send blasts of aether at his seemingly unimpressed opponent. Architect Emet-Selch would have effortlessly won this fight and could have been done with it already, and he bared his teeth at Zenos to continue playing the revenge-seeking Warrior of Light.

He had to be careful not to draw too much. After all, sorcery was a school of magic that often changed the appearance of the caster. Sorcerers using their full strength turned into what mortals would call monsters—back in the day it was already not exactly pretty to look at unless someone quite enjoyed the show.

Right now, he was playing a mage reaching his limits as his magic seemingly did nothing to an opponent. He faked the frustration on his face as he slung another volley of ice followed by a blast of intense fire.

Unfortunately for him he stumbled over the uneven ground in the dark.

From one second to the next he went from putting up a desperate fight as fake mortal to his opponent looming over him.

Zenos for his part merely put his blade against Emet-Selch’s neck. “Is that the extent of your hatred, saviour of the savages?”

“….”

“Is that the glorious, glorious revenge for your fallen disappointment of a Warrior of Light you imagined?”

Somewhere in the back, Yugiri barked out a “No!” which was cut short by the Witch of Doma simply kicking her while she was down. Emet-Selch merely chose to grimace at that before closing his eyes with a small smile on his lips. Mortal mages who dabbled in thaumaturgy had a strange, strange relationship with the very concept of death. Hopefully he sounded like a properly trained thaumaturge in that moment when he opened his eyes again. “Most certainly not. But one day the dead shall rise to haunt you, and even if you yourself care not in the slightest about their wailing then inevitably their bloodied hands will drag you through any and all hells that exist. And when that day comes, I cheer—because either I will be left alive, or be one of the many to destroy you body and soul.”

He expected a swift beheading.

What Zenos elected to do was shoving him away and kicking him to the ground. Emet-Selch let out a wheeze as the crashed into the ground and barely managed to roll away from a stomp that would have certainly broken every rib in his chest. He was unable to struggle back to his feet—Zenos merely stabbed a katana through his clothing to pin him to the ground on his back. A second blade was again put against his face, followed by a heavy metal boot on his back. He wheezed and squirmed but found himself unable to move between the blades and the heavy weight on his back.

“You speak, but your threats are as empty as anyone else’s. To think that you are one of the people to best van Baelsar. How… disappointing.”

The Garlean raised his katana.

An arrow soared past Zenos, which made him pause. An eerie echo of Rhalgr’s Reach—except that this time it was several arrows, all clearly shot as a distraction with no clear target. Zenos turned his head ever so slightly, and Emet-Selch, fully aware that he was not escaping this situation unscathed, used that moment to tear off the cloth that had him pinned to the ground, and shoved the blade near his face away. A painful cut on his hands was better than having to pretend he was dead, and he all but crawled away towards Yugiri. Yotsuyu had backed away from the shinobi at the very least.

The people of Yanxia led by this boy and the Warrior of Light.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Meteor eventually said with a wry smile once Emet-Selch and Yugiri struggled to their feet and stumbled on over to the people of Namai, “but Architect was not one of the people to best van Baelsar. He is an Eikon-slayer first and foremost, yae Galvus.”

A tacky twirl of a bow was hardly a provocation but their cocky grin most certainly was.

Surprisingly enough, Zenos merely withdrew uncontested.

The will to rebel was what he sought, after all—and the broken people of Yanxia had opened their once closed hearts to the passionate Yugiri. And him. The very cause of their problems if he were to speak the truth. The shinobi’s composure cracked as she sniffled a little while the people asked her if she could walk to a safer space.

Emet-Selch complained of his hurting back as they walked, to which the Warrior of Light replied with… a smack on said hurting back and a wide grin. He grimaced at them, but somehow he could not work up the energy to be dramatic. Listening to the chatter of the people with their dingy little weapons as they repeatedly expressed both concern for Lady Yugiri while also thanking her that she had not given up her passions after being met with so resounding a denial from the people she had tried to inspire. Inspiration, they called her—and they also thanked him for standing by her side for this fight. Yes, they had lost. Some even went as far as to say that the adventurer they called Architect would have likely died first and then Lady Yugiri would have been next. But somehow this loss had finally ignited the spark that Yugiri so desperately had hoped to see in her people. A Yanxia that would fight. A Doma that was worthy of her master’s sacrifice.

He almost felt like he was walking alongside a cluster of excited Amaurotines talking about the latest invention that was about to change the world for the better.

Judging from the plain and almost a little horrified surprise on Hythlodaeus’ face when they returned to Namai, his fellow Unsundered was making the same observation.

It wasn’t until the Oracle of Light started bandaging his cuts and bruises up with the Seer sitting beside her that Emet-Selch let out a sigh he hadn’t realised he had been holding for quite a while. The girl looked up at him with an expression that all but asked “What is it this time?” and he winced a little as she slathered something on a bruise and then bandaged it up.

“To think that I had half a mind to send you and Elidibus out with proper military company the day you appeared in my quarters unannounced,” he grumbled. “I thought it all lost aeons ago, but colour me surprised—these people do care about their fellow man.”

Ryne beamed at him.

“It makes them far from interesting or worthy of inheriting that which we had once, but it puts their worth above negative for once.”

But he had admitted that he considered them people out loud. The Oracle was quite pleased with it judging from her face as she finished her work with a satisfied little nod. Frustratingly enough, it seemed as if this statement in particular also surprised the Seer. Yugiri’s cryptic statement echoed in his head—he could not even begin to pretend that he understood what it meant, but somehow he knew that she had a point. Eventually he would have to talk to his fellow Unsundered one way or another. Whatever she meant by broken glass and broken bone remained to be seen.

**Author's Note:**

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